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In reply to the discussion: On this St. Patrick's Day I just found out that my 3x Great Grandfather lived 11.7 miles away from [View all]Warpy
(111,410 posts)where the poor soil was ideally suited to growing potatoes, where it hadn't been suited to growing much else. The importation of the potato was a godsend at first, you can get all of your nutrients from potatoes except vitmain A. An occasional carrot would suffice without breaking the family bank. Potatoes kept people healthy and fed on very little land. They thrived and the population exploded to 8 million at its peak.
The typical pattern of the Irish Diaspora was mostly to England, especially Liverpool and Manchester. Industry provided jobs and if it didn't, there was bare bones passage to the Americas.
I've found a lot of Irish from that period have no idea where their families were from or how they got here, the famine had been so horrific that all mention of what they had been through was suppressed, even the fact they were Irish. They did their best to forget everything that happened to them before they got off the boat.
Irish who arrived here before and after the famine remembered where they were from. Irish who arrived because of the famine have little memory, collectively, or where they were from or what happened to them.
Good luck in your search. Your family is listed somewhere, most churches kept records.