Transatlantic Passage: Immigration

April Night Dept: The Murphy clan's bid to escape the Great Famine that gripped Ireland in the 1840s ultimately led them to a hardscrabble homestead in Eastern Ontario, where a number of Irish families had already settled around present-day Westport, a picturesque village on the Rideau Canal between Kingston and Ottawa, according to Vancouver Sun. As it approached the Canadian coast at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on a dark April night further shrouded by mist, the ship struck a reef of ice that tore a hole in its wooden hull and a Canadian family's search for its 19th-century roots in Northern Ireland -which has already produced a book chronicling the 1849 sinking of an immigrant ship off the shores of Nova Scotia -has now been captured in documentary films on both sides of the Atlantic, including one to be shown in Canada on St. Patrick's Day. But before they reached that destination, John and Bridget Murphy, their four children and about 180 other Irish passengers aboard a ship called the Hannah, endured a horrific transatlantic passage that foreshadowed the sinking of the Titanic by 63 years. As reported in the news.
@t irish passengers, great famine