They came to Rockhampton: John Gorman: Donegal Relief Fund

John Gorman 1839-1912

John Gorman was my Great Great Grandfather.

During my search I found him arriving in Sydney on board the ship Caribou (1065 tons) on the 4^th October in 1859 from Liverpool England after a voyage of 92 days.

Caribou

The ship landed 388 passengers comprising 174 men, 168 women, 19 young boys and 27 young girls. They included 45 married couples. There had been three deaths (two boys and a man) and six births during the voyage.

I wondered if he came to Australia as a result of the Great Famine. But as I was to discover it was more complicated than that.

Passenger list for Caribou

John was listed on the passenger list as being 20 years old, occupation a ploughman (meaning he owned a plough and hired himself out to the farmer who had the horse), native place as Donegal, a Catholic, able to both read and write, and sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund. Looking at the ship manifest of the Caribou about 3 quarters of the passengers had Donegal Relief Fund next to their names. I was intrigued as to what this Donegal Relief Fund was and so began my search into conditions which led my Great Great Grandfather to come to Australia.

During the 16^th and 17^th Centuries the British government had confiscated a great deal of land in Ireland owned by Catholics and enacted penal laws restricting land-ownership to Protestants. This created a system of servitude for the Irish that was to continue for many generations. The majority of the population had little or no access to land and lived in appalling conditions. 40% of Irish houses in 1841 were one room mud cabins with natural earth floors, no windows and no chimneys.[1]

Famine family [Sean Sexton collection]

Famine in Ireland was not uncommon during the first half of the 19^th Century but none was as devastating as the ‘Great Hunger’, Great Famine 1848-1852, when it is estimated that one million died of starvation or related disease. And it was during this time that there was a mass exodus of people to Great Britain and America.

An indication of the scale of the disaster is reflected in the census figures. The 1841 census recorded an Irish population of 8.2 million. By 1851 this figure had been reduced to 6.5 million.

Even during the good times many small tenant farmers had to rely on access to income from elsewhere, such as peat-digging or using waste-land for common grazing, kelp collecting, fishing or seasonal work on large farms.

Northwest Donegal was perhaps the bleakest and poorest part of Ireland where land was often infertile bog.

For centuries the peasants’ stock had been allowed to graze on the mountains with any increase in stock helping to pay the rents. But all of this changed in Donegal in 1857 when landlords withdrew the grazing rights and imposed other financial hardships.

Turf hut Gweedore [National Library of Ireland]

In January 1858 ten Priests from the Gweedore/Cloughaneely area of Northwest Donegal formulated a letter[2] appealing to the Irish people to help. The districts of Gweedore and Cloughaneely were in a state of extreme distress. The priests talked of 800 families starving, living on seaweed, with scant clothing and no bedding.

Soon afterwards, this letter turned up in Sydney and so began what was to become the Donegal Relief Fund.

The architect of the fund was Archdeacon McEncroe of Sydney. There was a public meeting in May 1858 with more than 800 attending. Their practical resolution was that monies should be raised to help people from Gweedore and Cloughaneely immigrate to Australia. £200 was collected at this initial meeting at a time when the annual wage of a labourer was £32.

During the 1850s there was a shortage of labour in NSW caused by an exodus of people to the Victorian goldfields. The NSW government was encouraging people already in the colony to bring out friends and relations from their home countries. The scheme provided that the Government supplied the bulk of the cost of passage leaving the balance for the relative to pay. The Donegal Relief Fund was given permission by the Government to use this scheme.

Donegal Relief Fund

With a total of £4000 the organisers procured an Immigration Agent to work with the priests who had written the letter to firm up a list of names of people wishing to emigrate. Before the end of the year 1858, the agent had a list of 1200 names.

Although the original fund was established for the people of Gweedore and Cloughaneely its scope was widened to include other districts in the Northwest of Donegal including Letterkenny, the home of John Gorman.

Nile

John married Susan McClafferty in 1862 in Rockhampton Queensland.

Susan had arrived on the ship Nile on 4 May 1861 in Sydney and within 8 months they would wed some 1,400 kms away. Had John known Susan in Donegal? Or was there some other way they could have crossed paths?

Passenger list for Nile

On the passenger list Susan was listed as 19 years of age, occupation a general servant, from Mevagh (a parish 30 kms north of Letterkenny) in Donegal, Catholic, able to read but not write, and also sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund. I knew that family writings had the McClaffertys as being from Carrygrath which I soon discovered was Carrickart in the parish of Mevagh in Donegal.

Further discovery revealed that Susan’s sister Mary had been on board the ship Caribou with John Gorman and it appears that Susan’s brother Michael (Mark) arrived on the Nile with her. Both Mary and Michael were also sponsored by the Donegal Relief Fund.

The Donegal Relief Fund supplied passage for 1,384 passengers to emigrate from Ireland to Australia between May 1859 and June 1864.[3] All of the eight ships landed in Sydney.

http://donegalgenealogy.com/fiveshiploads.htm

https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/9153/8/06Chs7-8_Reid.pdf

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ireland/famine.htm