Finding Molly Johnson

Irish Famine Orphans in Canada

Mark G. McGowan

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780228023029
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contens
• Tables
• Acknowedgments
• Introduction: “You Will be Canadian Now”
• 1 A Much-Contested Calamity: Framing a Discussion of the Great Irish Famine and Migration
• 2 When Orphans Are Made: The Case of the Assisted Migrants and Orphans of Strokestown, County Roscommon
• 3 “The Fostering Protection of the Church”
• 4 Catholic Orphans in Protestant Towns
• 5 Assistance and Assimilation: Irish Orphans in New Brunswick
• 6 Brave New World
• Conclusion: Finding Molly Johnson
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index