A FAMILY ON THE MOVE

It’s hard not to get super-excited about transatlantic voyages and enterprising ancestors making new lives for themselves across the ocean. From a family history perspective that is, at 170-odd years’ distance.

But when we’re talking about the estimated one million Irish men, women and children who left their homeland during the Great Famine (and add to that the million or more who died of starvation or disease), the reality is almost too harrowing to think about.

I’ve been reading lately about the humid, overcrowded and sometimes barely seaworthy ‘coffin ships’; the most notorious of which left Ireland during the early years of the hunger. I’m hoping none of my Riboldis had to risk their lives on one of these, but