Book review: Church and Settlement in Ireland

teeth of the child skeletons exhibit both subtle and substantial marks of disease, malnutrition and trauma, and the manner in which they were buried has exposed how they were cared for in death’ (p. 86). Famine orphans in Canada are the focus of three essays in the book. Mark G. McGowan’s essay challenges the rose-tinted view of French-Canadian families adopting these children and welcoming them into their homes. A study of 619 Famine orphans who arrived at Quebec City suggests that many ‘children were essentially in a semiindentured service to the families in which they were placed’ and wanted to leave ‘their placements as soon as possible in order to secure independence or reunite with extended family members elsewhere’ in North America (pp. 96–7). An essay by Jason King demonstrates ‘the magnitude of distress that separated families suffer during migration crises’ (p. 136). King traces the efforts made by Famine orphan Robert Walsh to find his baby sister who had been left behind in Ireland when their family migrated across the Atlantic. Walsh became an orphan at the age of seven after his parents and younger brother died in the fever sheds of Grosse Île, Quebec. He was taken in by a caring French-Canadian family, and, unusually for a Famine orphan, he received a good education and became a priest. He travelled to Ireland in 1871–2 in hopes of fulfilling his dream of finding his long-lost sister. Lacking accurate information about his family’s origins, he searched in the wrong part of Ireland and found no trace of her. Distraught, he returned to Canada and died at the age of 33, having ‘succumbed to complications of typhus from which he had not fully recovered’ as a migrant child (p. 133). Koral LaVorgna’s essay examines the short-lived Emigrant Orphan Asylum in Saint John, New Brunswick, which was established in response to the high number of parentless children among Irish immigrants arriving in the late 1840s. The asylum, which operated for two years from 1847 to 1849, sought ‘to rescue destitute and orphaned children from the dangers of idleness’ and educate them (p. 153). The asylum closed once the Famine-driven crisis subsided, with the remaining twenty-three children transferred to the almshouse. As these examples show, this essay collection provides an illuminating and often harrowing introduction to the ways in which children experienced the Great Hunger and how these experiences have been remembered.