Here's how it all happened. Our great-great-great grandfather, David Moroney, was born in 1790 on a small farm in Macroney, about thirty miles northeast of Cork City. He married Johanna, a girl three years younger than himself and named their first child Maurice. Like more than a third of Irish families at the time they lived off the potatoes they grew and at twenty-two Maurice began to take over the farm from his father.
It was just then that something really strange started to happen. When he first dug up the potatoes they looked fine, but within a day or two they would start to get slimy, decaying into a black stinky mass.
Within a week the family farm had turned to rot and by the end of the month panic had turned into despair. By the next year the children and the old people were starting to die of famine, including David, leaving Johanna widowed with Maurice and his brother and sister who left the rotting fields of Macroney and moved in with Johanna’s family in Glenville.
Maurice wasn’t alone in his sorrow. In a parish not far from his devastated farm fourteen died one Sunday, only three of them were buried in coffins, the others covered only with the rags in which they perished. For, the popular saying went, ‘tis better to give a shilling to a starving man than spend four shillings on his coffin.
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Record of the arrival of Maurice, John, Margaret and their widowed mother Johanna in Boston in 1851 on the Bark Favorite, sailing from Cobh with 330 souls on board. |
So what happened to Maurice, our poor blighted potato farmer? He joined the one million Irishmen who emigrated on a coffin ship to Boston with his widowed mother and brother and sister. Seven years later he married Mary Sweeney in Lawrence and it was his son David, who moved to Hopkinton and had a son George who started a farm in Upton and had a son James Eugene who, as a carpenter, built a house for his bride Marguerite O’Leary in Millbury who had a son James Patrick and then a daughter Deborah Ann, who visited the Dunbrody famine ship today.
