Let’s have a ceilidh!

From the Archives – Mary Ducharme (August 2011)

fiddle Are you Hemmingford Irish? Tell us your ancestral story! GREEN and ORANGE! Volunteers of the archives are hoping for your collaboration for an Irish ceilidh this fall with historical displays, photos, art, stories, music and dance.

In the mid-19th century, hirelings of loyal British landlords came with sledgehammers and crowbars and battered down the stone and thatch crofts so that families could not return to their homes. There were better uses for land than renting tiny plots! If raising rents beyond the crofter’s ability to pay didn’t work, then more direct methods were used.

Draconian penal laws following Cromwell’s slaughter of the Irish forbid Catholics to be educated, to own land, to vote, to hold office, engage in professions, or practice their religion. In the end Catholics owned only 5% of their former lands. In retaliation, the Catholics formed violent secret societies, and in reaction so did the Protestants. Each lived with well-founded fear of massacre by the other. In the poisonous atmosphere of politics, economics and religion came the potato blight to add starvation. In the 1840’s, one-third of Ireland’s population either died or emigrated.

At a time when food was being exported to England, ragged paupers roamed the countryside, leaving their dead unburied along roadsides, mouths ringed with a green stain from eating grass. The dispossessed crowded workhouses and villages. Then there were the “coffin ships,” the disease-ridden vessels that relieved landlords of unwanted paupers by sending them overseas to Canada and the United States. And in their new homelands, the helpless refugees were seldom received with kindness.

The community narrative of our Hemmingford Irish settlers and their descendants would be greatly enriched by individual stories of individuals or families who came here before, during, or after the Potato Famine.

Why exactly did they come? Do you know the name of their ship? What was their story once they arrived? Where did they settle? What were their occupations? What Irish culture did they bring with them in terms of music, story-telling, language, beliefs?

History, when it is our own ancestral story, touches us deeply, and leaps from written pages into our personal lives. It opens new perspectives to both past and present.