The potato, introduced into Ireland in the last decades of the 16th century, was the superfood of its day. A highly nutritious crop that produced a large yield on low-quality land made it possible for farmers and labouring families to feed themselves from a small holding. From the 18th century the potato became the ubiquitous subsistence crop of the agrarian class in Ireland.
As the Irish population grew, reaching five million by the end of the 18th century and eight million by the time of the 1841 census, many large families, eking out a living on increasingly diminishing land holdings, were entirely reliant on the potato as their only source of food. This was supplemented with milk, and occasionally meat or fish.
In the summer of 1845 a fungus, known as blight, appeared on potato crops in Europe, arriving in Ireland by the autumn. The disease quickly spread across the country, destroying the potato in the fields. In November a Relief Commission was established, tasking police constables and other officials across the country with surveying their local potato crop and reporting on the progress of the blight and the resulting level of distress. Organised by county, these reports can be found in the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) under reference RLFC.
By February 1846, the commission had set up local Relief Committees to respond to the impact of the loss of the potato, and committee correspondence is available in Ancestry’s collection ‘Ireland, Famine Relief Commission Papers, 1844–1847’. While they only document the names of the committee members, often local landlords, parish priests and ministers, and local donors, the correspondence provides insight into the impact of the burgeoning Famine as well as the local response.
The majority of the Irish population lived in a rural setting, and were entirely dependent on the potato for sustenance. The failure of the first potato crop forced families to purchase food. To purchase food they needed money. Families that could not find paid work sold what they could – fishing nets, farm implements or livestock, or furniture – as a short-term measure to ensure a supply of increasingly expensive food over the winter. But the blight did not just affect a single season; it persisted, season after season, destroying each new crop.
By the winter of 1846/1847 a vast number of the Irish population were facing starvation, and competition for the resources to feed a family was fierce. With nothing left to sell, entire families were found huddled in empty houses, under a pile of rags, starving. When work could be found, often through government public works schemes, the men of the house were given the lion’s share of the food available, to sustain them through a working day. This deprivation had a huge impact on the growth and development of infants and young children.
Many starving families took refuge in the recently established, but suddenly overwhelmed, Poor Law Union workhouses, which offered indoor and outdoor relief. Workhouse records, if they still survive for the period, are usually held in the local county archive; find out more at Peter Higginbotham’s website The Workhouse. Some of this material is available digitally; for example records from Dublin are included in the collection ‘Workhouses and Poor Law in Institutions & Organisations in Ireland’, which is available on Findmypast.
Charitable organisations sprang up, including soup kitchens. The Irish Church Missionary Society offered soup to the starving Catholic families of the west of Ireland provided they converted to the Protestant faith, the resultant converts being known as ‘soupers’. This practice was far less common than is generally believed, and the majority of Protestant (and Quaker) charitable relief offered during the Famine had no strings attached.
The impact of the Famine dramatically changed the landscape of Ireland. Roughly one million people died of fever and starvation, while another million left the country for Britain, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand in short order. Over the following decades another two million departed, reducing the Irish population to four million. Families also left their lands for urban centres, where there were significantly more employment opportunities.
The Famine’s repercussions were worst in the west, and counties like Leitrim, Roscommon and Mayo were the hardest hit. Where there were alternative industries, such as textiles in the north-east and dairy in the south-west, the population fared somewhat better. However, there was not a corner of the island that did not feel the effects of the loss of the potato crop between 1845 and 1849.
Documenting the population during this period is very challenging. While the 1841 and 1851 census records were destroyed in 1922 in the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin during the Civil War, the population data gathered for both censuses was included in parliamentary reports, and offers stark insight. Published from 1851 and partly available on the Internet Archive, the population statistics for each of the townlands in 1841 and 1851 reveal how many people left the townland over the decade, and how many houses were abandoned.
Famine Distress reports can be found in a special collection within the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers (CSORP) in the NAI in Dublin, with heart-wrenching accounts of the level of deprivation found across the country.
Records of emigration during and immediately after the Famine can be ad hoc, and there is no record of travel to Britain. However, Ira A Glazier and Michael Tepper’s seven-volume Famine Immigrants (Genealogical Publishing, 1983–1986) documents the arrival of the Irish into the Port of New York between 1846 and 1851, and has been indexed at Ancestry, Findmypast and FamilySearch. The publication allows you to easily recognise family groups, which is missing from the online collections.
Some Irish landowners paid for their distressed tenants to emigrate, abandoning land that could no longer sustain them. Some collections of Irish estate papers include records of such assisted emigration.
For example, emigrants from the Fitzwilliam Estate in County Wicklow are documented in emigration books that are held in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and have been published online by Jim Rees.
Some landed estate papers, such as for the Wandesforde Estate in County Kilkenny, also include letters from tenants seeking relief or money to emigrate, including women writing to the wife of the landowners pleading for a spare cloak or item of clothing that might see them through the coming winter. As many landlords served on the local Relief Committees, their papers can record relief that was given to tenants.
Famine orphans, especially young women, were selected from Irish workhouses by officers of the Emigration Commission, and taken to Australia in the late 1840s and early 1850s in a programme known as the Earl Grey Scheme. These emigrants can be found listed at the Irish Famine Memorial in Sydney, and the names are online. There were also men and women who committed a crime, seeking transportation to Australia as a convict, as relief from the deprivation in Ireland at the time. A transportation database has been published on the website of the NAI, which you can access here.
