Writer Ray McKenna discusses his ancestors and other refugees who fled Monaghan and Tyrone during the Great Hunger. As if the loss of the potato crop was not enough, secular violence inflamed Clogher that same month. While men and women from every county in Ireland poured into Providence during the famine years, between a third and a half of those people originated close to the border of Monaghan and Tyrone. It began a chain of migration to Providence which fundamentally altered both the communities they were leaving and the new ones they embraced in Rhode Island. This is an intimate examination of a community sundered by famine and immigration through the experiences of his own family, their relatives and friends.
