Overview

For three years a mysterious potato blight devastated Ireland's 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 America's 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 family's 1848 migration from County Galway, Ireland, to Brooklyn, New York, in the era of the Irish Potato Famine.

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9781736378724

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Jack Bodkin is a retired Certified Public accountant. Briarhill to Brooklyn is his first book. He was born in Brooklyn in 1947, and for the first two years of his life his family lived at 325 Clinton Avenue, about a hundred yards from his great-great-uncle Dominic's home at 290 Clinton. In 1950 the family moved to the post-World War II community of Merrick, Long Island. After graduating from Chaminade High School and Wheeling College, he returned to Long Island in 1969 and worked in New York City until 1977. He lives in Wheeling, West Virginia, with his wife, Christine, and their Yorkie, Lilly.

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