The family history records note that, during the summer of 1827, the McConnell family and several members of the Moncrief
family sailed from Belfast, Ireland to seek better fortunes in Canada. Crossing
the Atlantic Ocean was quite a test of endurance. In the Johnson/McConnell
letters, a family member recorded that the hardships endured on the sailing
vessels included crowded conditions, no facilities, very little food and no
medicine. Many died of “the fever” and from scurvy. The deceased were buried at
sea with little or no ceremony.
For those who made it to Canada, it was like
jumping from the frying pan into the fire because, at that time, the Irish were
thought of as the lowest form of mankind. Settlers walked from Montreal to
Ottawa, then came down the Rideau River by raft to Kingston. From
there, they took boats to Belleville and then walked or rode through the
heavily timbered land to find their homesteads. They acquired the land but that
was just the beginning. They had to build cabins and barns and then clear
enough land to grow food. They were true pioneers!
Why
did so many Irish emigrate? History records that, from 1820 to 1847, most people
living in Ireland were trying to survive on a small piece of land in a crowded
country, the most crowded one in Europe. In 1821, there were 251 people to the
square mile. In industrialized Ulster, for each square mile of land fit for
tillage or grazing there were 434 people trying to support themselves. More
than 300,000 Irish farms had less than three acres. Under such conditions, the
efforts to keep alive often did not last long.
For
all rural Ireland in 1841 the average age at death was 19 and not a fifth of
the population lived beyond 40 years of age. Famine and cholera appeared in the
early thirties, and varying degrees of crop failure haunted the early forties, even
before the total loss of the potato crop in 1845 and 1846. Emigration offered a
way out. It was relatively heavy in the eastern counties of Ulster from 1815 to
1820. In most of Ulster during one three-year period in the early thirties, two
out of every hundred people left the country.
Famine
and fever made 1846 a year of wholesale agony. It brought death to about half a
million people in Ireland. The survivors lived in a miserable confused state of
economic dislocation Two-thirds of the population was “reduced to a state of
pauperism.” The pressure of population, even in the thirties, had made one labourer
in three an excess mouth to feed. The high unemployment, low wages and inflated
rental costs swelled the ranks of the poor. After the famine, very few rents were
paid and evictions were widespread numbering in the tens of thousands. People
owed each other but couldn’t pay. So, most small tradesmen went bankrupt. From
such conditions, 200,000 people fled as emigrants in 1846-1847. By 1849, in the
little town of Antrim near Belfast, “Nearly every door is closed. The people
can scarcely live in it.”
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