Chapter 6 - Remembering Famine Orphans: The Transmission of Famine Memory between Ireland and Quebec

Summary

The adoption of Irish Famine orphans by French-Canadian families has long been remembered in Quebec as a traumatic historical experience that nevertheless brought the French and Irish closer together. It is commonplace to note that many of these famine orphans kept their Irish surnames but became fully integrated into French-Canadian society. In the ‘Orphans’ Heritage Minute – a genre of sixty-second capsule history broadcast frequently by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1990s – French-Canadian ‘sympathy for the victims’ and endeavours to ‘preserve the Irish identity of the children’ are specifically emphasised. This chapter examines the documentary sources on which the popular memory of the famine orphans is based. In particular, it suggests that their memory can be traced not to contemporary records and correspondences between the French-Canadian and Irish clerics, religious and lay benefactors and government officials who first ministered to the famine migrants on Grosse Isle and in Montreal in 1847, but rather to a set of pastoral letters, pamphlets, didactic novels and travelogues published a generation after the Famine in the 1860s, especially John Francis Maguire's The Irish in America (1868).