Briarhill to Brooklyn: An Irish Family's Journey to Freedom and Opportunity

For three years a mysterious potato blight devastated Irelands cla-cháns townlands and cities. Nearly a million died. Was it the prospect of starvation the snows of Black 47 or the fear of typhus that made the Bodkins leave? Or was it the dream of Americas freedom and opportunity that drove the family from Galway onto an Irish coffin ship known as Cushlamachree? Their destination was Brooklyn. An unimaginable hurdle confronted the seven young Bodkin siblings only days after docking in New York. Would the fever get them too? But they managed to survive into adulthood as they were led by their two oldest brothers-Dominic and Martin. Dominic a fledgling surgeon on the Alabama battlefields of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely spends thirty-five years delivering and caring for thousands of Brooklyn babies. Martin a Civil War veteran and later an ironmonger with his own shop ultimately is the progenitor of a large family of New York Bodkins. Briarhill to Brooklyn is a novel grounded in facts in which Jack Bodkin tells the story of his Irish Catholic familys 1848 migration from County Galway Ireland to Brooklyn New York in the era of the Irish Potato Famine....See More