Great Famine Voices Roadshow Toronto

The Great Famine Voices Roadshow was welcomed to Toronto by Robert Kearns, Chairman and Founder of Ireland Park Foundation.

Ireland Park is located on the Toronto waterfront where the first steamer Toronto arrived with 1100 Famine migrants on the eighth of June, 1847. Between then and the end of that year, some 38,500 Famine migrants arrived in Toronto when the population was just twenty thousand. Ireland Park was designed and conceived as a point to commemorate the story of their arrival, those who failed to survive the voyage and who died in the fever sheds here, and also to celebrate those who did survive and who went on to make a major contribution to this city, to Ontario, and to Canada. This is a quiet tranquil place on the Toronto waterfront where you can experience views of the water to the west and to the east. It is a cemetery without bodies. It is a place of solemnity and reverence.

Murder in Niagara

The Great Famine Voices Roadshow also met with Professor Mark McGowan, who is leading the search for Strokestown’s missing 1,490 former tenants who were forced to emigrate from Major Denis Mahon’s estate in 1847.

Professor McGowan shared his fascinating discovery of the murder case perpetrated by Patrick Brennan in 1848, involving several Strokestown emigrants from the 1,490 (link), at Queenston Heights, Ontario, on the Niagara peninsula. Read his account at this link.