I hope this post will be of some interest; it is my first publication about the Famine orphan ‘girls’ that appeared in 1987 in Familia the Journal of what was then the Ulster Historical Foundation. I gather the Foundation still exists. See http://www.ancestryireland.com
There are another sixteen interesting articles in this particular issue including a review of Patrick O’Farrell’s Irish in Australia, Trevor Parkhill on Ulster emigration to Oz, Richard Reid on Irish chain migration, and Desmond Mullan on Father Willie Devine who among many other things was appointed as chaplain to the Australian forces in 1914 by Archbishop Mannix.
You will notice i had already decided on Barefoot and Pregnant? as a title for my work, a title that not everyone has understood. So let me explain once more. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the “Earl Grey Scheme” will know of Surgeon Douglass’s scathing dismissal of the young women in his charge. They were he said “professed public women and barefooted little country beggars”; some of them had had a child, and many were not orphans at all! See my earlier blogposts 43-47, beginning https://earlgreysfamineorphans.wordpress.com/2017/01/21/earl-greys-irish-famine-orphans-43/
So the first element to my title is a question (note the question mark, Barefoot and Pregnant? How many of you noticed it? How many did not?) I’m simply asking, was Surgeon Douglass right in condemning the Earl Grey workhouse orphans as he did?
Another element, though perhaps not so pertinent for everyone nowadays, stemmed from my being a fan of a number of singers, Bob Marley, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, and Joan Armatrading, for example. Do you remember Joan Armatrading’s “Barefoot and Pregnant”? It had particular moment for all the women who were fed up being kept ‘barefoot and pregnant’, and ‘in the kitchen’.
The third interpretation of my title then, and i was hoping people would think about how the title was phrased, that they would ask for themselves, did these Famine orphans come from a society where their choices and opportunities were limited? Would there be greater choices and opportunities for them in Australia? Or would social structures, lack of economic opportunities, and the weight of cultural mores limit what they could do in Australia also? Could they become literate? What chances did they have of going to a university? Could they buy land on their own? Could they pursue a career of their own? Could they vote? Could they sit in parliament? Or were they sent into another confinement (pun intended) by the patriarchal nature of Australian society?
Alas i think i failed with that title.
What follows is the short piece i was urged to write by the then Deputy Keeper of the Public Records of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Dr Brian Trainor. I had just spent a short period of study-leave among the archives testing out my theories of how to find the Famine orphans among the workhouse records that have survived. It is thanks to Brian Trainor that so many of the Indoor workhouse registers have survived. Without his understanding and agitation many would have ended up in the tip. Sadly, present day politicians and bureaucrats in Australia are allowing our precious records to perish. 21/6/21 Fingers crossed. There may be some last minute funding on the way.
It is a tentative effort, and concerns only the first vessel, the Earl Grey, that arrived in Port Jackson 6 October 1848 . Nowadays thanks to heaps of people, writers, historians, genealogists, family historians, archivists, holders of the public records torch, much more is known about the Irish Famine orphans. One error that struck me in this piece was my inclusion of the Ramillies to Port Adelaide as part of the ‘Earl Grey scheme’. The error carried over to Volume one of my Barefoot. That ship may indeed have carried a number of Irish born workhouse women but they were mostly from Marylebone workhouse in London, not from any Irish workhouse. I remain to be corrected on this.
Bloomsday is upon us.
trevo's Irish famine orphans 
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