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DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:
Join us for a lecture and book launch where Mark McGowan, Professor of History and Celtic Studies, and Principal Emeritus of the University of St. Michael’s College, reflects on the history and efforts involved in uncovering the lives and whereabouts of nearly 1,700 Irish Famine Orphans, who are featured in his new book, Finding Molly Johnson: Adventures and Mis-adventures Tracking Irish Famine Orphans in Canada.
Fr. Madden Hall, Carr Hall, 100 St Joseph Street Toronto ON M5S 1J4
More details and RSVP here: https://stmikes.utoronto.ca/event/professor-mcgowan-book-launch-finding-molly-johnson
Mark G. McGowan is professor of history at the University of Toronto and principal emeritus of St Michael’s College. His is the author of several books including The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914–1918.
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.