About
I'm an Aussie living in Ireland. In the mid-1990s I worked at Hyde Park Barracks Museum, which in 1848 operated as the Immigration Depot for the Irish orphan girls sent to Sydney as part of the Orphan Emigration Scheme.
This website has been created as part of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in Heritage Studies at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), Mayo Campus. The content has arisen from my final year dissertation (2015), and forms an ongoing project to discover more information about the 137 Mayo orphan girls sent to Australia as part of the Scheme, from the workhouses of Ballina, Ballinrobe, Castlebar and Westport.
Please note that, in reality, despite being called ‘Irish orphan girls’, those from Co Mayo were young women who reported their ages as being between 14 and 20 years old. However, this website uses the term ‘girls’ throughout to reflect the name given to them in the official reports, workhouse records, and newspapers of the period.
This project is indebted to the research completed by Trevor McClaughlin on the Irish orphan girls, published in Barefoot and Pregnant?: Irish Famine Orphans in Australia, Volume 1 (1991) and Volume 2 (2001). The Orphan Registers created by Trevor McClaughlin are now searchable online via the Famine Orphan Girl Database, maintained by the Irish Famine Memorial Sydney. Trevor McClaughlin's new blog on the Irish Famine Orphans can be found here.
My research on the Mayo Orphan Girls is ongoing, however I will not be updating this website with new information. If you have an interest in the orphan girls, or are a descendant of one of the Mayo girls, I would love to hear from you. I may hold additional information than currently appears on this site.
I always love to hear from descendants of the Mayo girls, or anyone who has more information on the girls, or would like to comment on the site.
Please make contact via email or Twitter.
This website has been created as part of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in Heritage Studies at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), Mayo Campus. The content has arisen from my final year dissertation (2015), and forms an ongoing project to discover more information about the 137 Mayo orphan girls sent to Australia as part of the Scheme, from the workhouses of Ballina, Ballinrobe, Castlebar and Westport.
Please note that, in reality, despite being called ‘Irish orphan girls’, those from Co Mayo were young women who reported their ages as being between 14 and 20 years old. However, this website uses the term ‘girls’ throughout to reflect the name given to them in the official reports, workhouse records, and newspapers of the period.
This project is indebted to the research completed by Trevor McClaughlin on the Irish orphan girls, published in Barefoot and Pregnant?: Irish Famine Orphans in Australia, Volume 1 (1991) and Volume 2 (2001). The Orphan Registers created by Trevor McClaughlin are now searchable online via the Famine Orphan Girl Database, maintained by the Irish Famine Memorial Sydney. Trevor McClaughlin's new blog on the Irish Famine Orphans can be found here.
My research on the Mayo Orphan Girls is ongoing, however I will not be updating this website with new information. If you have an interest in the orphan girls, or are a descendant of one of the Mayo girls, I would love to hear from you. I may hold additional information than currently appears on this site.
I always love to hear from descendants of the Mayo girls, or anyone who has more information on the girls, or would like to comment on the site.
Please make contact via email or Twitter.
© Barbara Barclay (2015)
