Timeline of the Irish Potato Famine 1845-1851
'The Great Irish Potato Famine'? If I recall rightly, that one was just as shocking in the detail, but it was a little more layered under statistics than Woodham-Smith.
I do recall looking at lists of figures and not quite seeing the picture. Then I let my mind wonder onto what these figures actually represented. In some ways, that was worse than Woodham-Smith spelling it out.
Simple maths does tell most of a picture there, but we still have to be careful not to assign it all to starvation. Just because there's a huge genocide going on, it doesn't mean that people aren't also dying in unrelated ways. Much smaller numbers, obviously, but nevertheless there.
Plus there were the devastating pandemics that accompanied the potato blight. Those in, say Antrim, were more likely to have died of typhus or cholera during this time.
There are also those dying on the coffin ships. The emigration figures tend to look at those who arrived, not those who left. The latter was a much bigger number!
No-one can ever say that the Irish population wasn't horrifically hit though. Even today, their numbers haven't quite recovered; and the demographics were utterly changed.
I'm familiar with the situation in the New York tenements too. May I recommend 'Five Points' by Tyler Anbinder for more information about that?
Harrington was/is a big surname in Ireland, but comes from two roots. One is an English plantation family, who were landowners and probably not people that either of us hope to be related to. The other comes from Anglocizing a Gaelic surname that was prevalent in the Cork area. They actually were Irish. :)
JoHarrington, Sep 4, 2012
