From Staff Reports

ALFRED — Resident Mary Lee Dunn has contributed a chapter to a new Irish history book, “The Famine Irish: Emigration and the Great Hunger,” edited by historian Ciaran Reilly and set to be published in early April by the History Press Ireland. The work is a collection of essays, most of them presented at a conference at Ireland’s Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon, in 2013.

While Dunn did not attend that conference, she was invited to submit a paper for the book because of her independent work researching related famine history. Dunn’s chapter in the new book is titled “The Women of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon: Claiming New Ground.”

In the chapter, Dunn examines how the female evictees of Ballykilcline fared in their new lives. The chapter is an extension of the studies that Dunn wrote about in her own book, “Ballykilcline Rising: From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America,” which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2008.

The new essays “examine the fate of Irish emigrants in Australia, Canada, the United States of America and Tasmania,” according to its editor. “Using a myriad of new sources, these essays challenge long-held assumptions about Irish communities and individuals.”

Other contributors include Gerard Moran, James Farrell, Christine Kinealy and Michael Quigley.

Dunn’s chapter concerns the famine in the townland of Ballykilcline in Kilglass Parish, Roscommon. The tenants there suffered greatly during the famine years, waged a rent strike for more than a decade, and were finally evicted en masse in 1847 and 1848 and sent to the United States by British authorities.

The Mahons had subleased the townland from the crown, and the town’s residents had been Mahon tenants for decades prior to their strike. Dunn’s work explores the local pre-famine and famine conditions, and studies how the evictees fared in the U.S. Many of the town’s inhabitants settled in Rutland, Vermont, and became the workforce of its marble industry as it boomed in the 1850s.