Famine Diary

Download or read book Famine Diary written by Gerald Keegan and published by Irish American Book Company. This book was released on 1991 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald Keegan was one of the emigrants who left famine conditions in County Sligo, Ireland and made the long voyage across the Atlantic. He experienced firsthand the shocking conditions on Grosse Ile, conditions so shocking that the Canadian government of the day tried every way possible to keep the public from finding out about it. The dairy he kept was first published in Huntington, Quebec in 1895, but was censored by the government for being too frank an exposure of the injustices that were at the root of the emigration movement. Writer James Mangan has taken Gerald Keegan's Famine diary and edited it to make it more intelligible to readers who might not be familiar with the historical background of the mass emigration movement from Ireland in 1847. For this book, he also changed the language idiom into a more modern type of expression, and introduced a number of characters in order to fill out the historical background of the emigration movement. In doing this, every precaution was made to maintain the charming simplicity and frankness of the original author, Gerald Keegan. Today, we know about the cruelty of the Irish landlords, but life aboard the coffin ships is hardly documented and the ultimate fate of the emigrants is rarely adverted to. Keegan's dairy shows us the face of the famine dead. -- from Introduction.