History Pre-confederation (to 1867)
Finding Molly Johnson
Irish Famine Orphans in Canada
- Publisher
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2024
- Category
- Pre-Confederation (to 1867), Ireland
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780228022992
- Publish Date
- Sep 2024
- List Price
- $110.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780228023005
- Publish Date
- Sep 2024
- List Price
- $39.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780228023029
- Publish Date
- Sep 2024
- List Price
- $39.95
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Description
Ireland’s Great Famine produced Europe’s worst refugee crisis of the nineteenth century. More than 1.5 million people left Ireland, many ending up in Canada. Among the most vulnerable were nearly 1,700 orphaned children who now found themselves destitute in an unfamiliar place. The story Canada likes to tell is that these orphans were adopted by benevolent families and that they readily adapted to their new lives, but this happy ending is mostly a myth.
In Finding Molly Johnson Mark McGowan traces what happened to these children. In the absence of state support, the Catholic and Protestant churches worked together to become the orphans’ principal caregivers. The children were gathered, fed, schooled, and placed in family homes in Saint John, Quebec, Montreal, Bytown, Kingston, and Toronto. Yet most were not considered members of their placement families, but rather sources of cheap labour. Many fled their placements, joining thousands of other Irish refugees on the Canadian frontier searching for work, extended family, and the opportunity to begin a new life.
Finding Molly Johnson revisits an important chapter of the Irish emigrant experience, revealing that the story of Canada’s acceptance of the famine orphans is a product of national myth-making that obscures both the hardship the children endured and the agency they ultimately expressed.
About the author
Mark G. McGowan is professor of history at the University of Toronto, Principal Emeritus of St Michael’s College, and the author of Michael Power: The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier and The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922.
Other titles by
Imperial Irish
Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914-1918
The Imperial Irish
Canada's Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914-1918
The Great War as I Saw It
Michael Power
The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier
Michael Power
The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier
Waning of the Green
Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887-1922
The Waning of the Green
Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887-1922