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22 Jan 07 - 04:07 AM (#1944008) Subject: BS: Irish immigration to Iowa From: mg Here is an interesting link http://www.celticcousins.net/irishiniowa/emigrationnotes.htm click I could never figure out how Irish, including my family, ended up in Iowa after the potato famine..how they could afforded the passage.they might have escaped the tenements of New York...I am a little vague.. Anyway, there is something in here that explains it...that the farmers of Iowa and I think other states put out a plea and apparently arranged transportation for laborers. I also have always wondered how starving people could afford to leave. They weren't rich to start with and if you had starving children you probably would buy food rather than tickets because you just wouldn't have the money. The Irish Rovers had a special years ago that explained some of it. I think landlords paid for some of their tenants to go. And after a while families sent for each other but there wouldn't have been that many here to start with at the start of the famine. But here is what the Irish Rovers special said...that the passengers were used as ballast and saved the boat owners the expense of unloading rocks or whatever else was used as they could walk themselves out. Who knows..maybe some passages were free...it is a little disconcerting to think of one's ancestors as ballast but oh well. mg |
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22 Jan 07 - 10:35 AM (#1944283) Subject: RE: BS: Irish immigration to Iowa From: GUEST,pattyClink We learned how some of our forebears made the crossing recently, and disconcerting is an understatement. There were landlords who wished to 'clear' their land of pesky people and replace them with vast sheep ranges. They evicted so many people that the poorhouses were filling up. A law was passed forcing any such landlord to kick in x number of pounds to the poorhouse or government for the support of the person displaced. So, the clever landlords discovered it was cheaper to hire a cheap ship and fill it with their evicted tenants and get them out of the country. |
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22 Jan 07 - 12:43 PM (#1944440) Subject: RE: BS: Irish immigration to Iowa From: KB in Iowa I have long wondered how folks starving due to a potato famine (or any other reason) could afford to come to America. While for most folks it wasn't free, it seems that for some it was compulsory (slave trade aside). I found it interesting (in mg's link) that the paper advising against leaving the east for the west was a New York paper. They could well have been right, what with the panic of 1857 and all, but they wouldn't have been exactly unbiased. For the record, the earliest any of my ancestors came to Iowa was 1846, the same time period as in the article. They came from North Carolina though, not Ireland. |