Them Wild Woods

Educated at Campbell College, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin, Bill Jackson retired in 1999 from a career with Oxfam, the Irish public service and the United Nations. That emigration tore Irish families apart is a given, but rarely is the separation chronicled across three generations. These hitherto unpublished letters describe the life of an Ulster Quaker shop-keeping family whose daughter married and emigrated in 1818. They bring out the fears of parents who will never see their child again and the preoccupations of sisters and brothers who remained behind, caring for the parents and themselves hoping just as much for material success, romance and marriage, as well as for spiritual fulfilment. They reveal along the way the situation of Irish Friends in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the difficulties of making one's way, whether in unsettled Tyrone or settler upstate New York. Among other things, just about everyone who was anyone in Dungannon and its...