A tale of two towns – a local history of the Great Irish Famine 

When Findmypast’s research specialist and expert genealogist, Jen Baldwin, began tracing her 4x great‑grandfather Archibald MacKenzie, she uncovered a story rooted in two places profoundly shaped by the Great Famine: Macroom, County Cork and Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. 

Archinbald MacKenzie, Jen's 4x great-grandfather.

Through family history records like census returns and newspaper reports, Jen stitched together a picture of what the Famine felt like to the communities who lived through it. One town’s catastrophe became another’s transformation. This is their shared story. 

Before the Famine took hold – life in Macroom 

Today, the market town of Macroom sits in southwest Ireland, known for its golf course and local traditions. But its landscape and population were ravaged nearly two centuries ago by a change of circumstances few saw coming. 

Most families in and around Macroom in the early 19th century lived as small tenant farmers or labourers, their livelihoods almost entirely depending on the potato crop. Poor wages, limited land access, and rising rents meant that most households were only one bad harvest or a landlord’s decision away from crisis. 

Map of Macroom, c.1841, from the National Library of Scotland. 

Local tension wasn’t uncommon. In 1822, Whiteboy-inspired gatherings around Macroom led to violent clashes with soldiers. High rents, tithes, and the loss of customary rights pushed working families to the brink. 

And if you fell on hard times, the parish was often the only dependable source of charity. Work was seasonal, and savings were rare. Even on the edge of catastrophe, Macroom was already stretched thin. 

The Great Hunger arrives in Macroom 

By the mid‑1840s, this entire region was being squeezed by poverty and political tension. And then came the potato blight. Reports from the time paint a devastating picture: families collapsing from hunger, children sleeping on bare floors, and the Macroom Workhouse, designed for 600, full to the brim with over 1,400 desperate people. 

A journalist in the Cork Examiner, 5 February 1847, wrote of their concerns in Macroom.  

Hunger, famine and desperation were woven into the very fabric of this community – it wasn’t something you’d be able to ignore if you took a stroll through Macroom in the 1840s. 

For those still struggling to survive, support through the British government’s ‘relief through labour’ programme was offered: wages in exchange for road building. 

Irish tenants are evicted from their homes, in the Illustrated London News, 16 December 1848.

But the wages weren’t enough to feed a working man, barely enough for one meal a day, let alone a whole family. And sometimes, they weren't paid on time, or simply not at all. The system accused them of slacking, but in reality, they were starving. On a broader scale, Ireland was suffering. In early 1847, one reporter commented: 

Those who didn’t succumb to hunger had a choice: stay, and struggle to survive, or leave their homes in Ireland behind. But even the latter came with its challenges. 

The Famine and Irish migration to Wales

Like many families, Jen’s MacKenzie ancestors didn’t cross the Atlantic straight away. They took the shorter, more affordable step first: crossing the Irish Sea. 

That brings us to the next chapter of the MacKenzies’ story: by the early 1850s, the family was living in Merthyr Tydfil, a booming industrial town where ironworks dominated the landscape. Many Irish migrants found work in these forges, so desperate that they would take any job that was offered to them. But it was hard, dirty, necessary labour. 

In the 1851 Census of England, Wales and Scotland, around 3,500 people living in Merthyr Tydfil were born in Ireland. By 1861, that figure rose to nearly 5,000. Those simple stats show how small communities like Merthyr were a chance at a fresh start for those affected by famine in Ireland. 

A later map of Merthyr Tydfil, illustrating the town’s reliance on forges, mines, and quarries. OpenStreetMap, NLS.

Welsh life brought opportunity, but it brought tension too. Irish migrants were often packed into crowded lodgings and viewed with discrimination. The article below describes the Irish quarter of Merthyr as bearing ‘a very bad reputation, being continually disgraced by scenes of a most riotous description; drunkenness and fighting are of perpetual recurrence.’ 

Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 17 October 1857.

Jen’s MacKenzie ancestors settled on Bethesda Street for a time. Just behind this street was an area known as ‘China,’ described in an 1870 newspaper article as ‘the abode of thieves and prostitutes.’ 

The Hibernia Public House on Bethesda Street in the 1851 Census. Note the Irish Sheehan family with children born in Merthyr. View the full record here.

Places like the Hibernian Beerhouse reflected the Irish community and presence in Merthyr, as we can see in the snapshot above from the 1851 Census. 

And in fact, Jen’s 4x great-grandfather would find himself arrested after a brawl with the police in this exact establishment nine years later. The article below goes on to say, ‘The prisoner Mc’Kenzie appeared to have been roughly – we do not say undeservedly – treated by the police, his head having no less than eight wounds upon it.’ Archibald was sentenced to six months for assaulting a police officer. 

Merthyr Telegraph, and General Advertiser for the Iron Districts of South Wales, 31 March 1860. 

Archibald wasn’t the only MacKenzie to have a brush with the law in Merthyr. In 1862, Elizabeth and Jane MacKenzie, mother and daughter, were charged with an ‘unprovoked assault on potato merchant John Williams'.

The assault came after Elizabeth fell into rent arrears, an indication of the family's poverty while Archibald was in prison. This one article tells us so much about the MacKenzies' lives in Wales, about how tough it was for Irish migrants in their new communities, and serves as a reminder that every source helps us delve deeper to understand the broader story.

Elizabeth and Jane MacKenzie in arrears for rent, as reported in Merthyr Telegraph, and General Advertiser for the Iron Districts of South Wales, 12 April 1862. 

Despite the difficulties, life in Merthyr was a turning point for many of the Irish who settled there. Children born in Cork were joined by children born in Wales. Household boarders became family through marriage. In fact, Archibald’s son John was born at Bethesda Street in 1856. 

John MacKenzie’s birth record. 

And slowly, through grit and long hours, families rebuilt what the Famine had taken. But not without the fear and prejudice that came with being migrants trying to find a home in a new community. 

For many Irish migrants, Wales wasn’t the final chapter, but it was the bridge that made the next chapter possible. One by one, the MacKenzies left Wales and made for the United States, settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Discover and understand your family’s Irish story 

The Irish Famine is often described in overwhelming numbers: millions lost, millions displaced. But when we zoom in, when we delve deeper, the story becomes something more human. 

Macroom shows us what collapse looked like at the household level, and Merthyr shows us the long, uneven journey of rebuilding. 

The story of Jen's MacKenzie ancestors is just one journey, one window into the Great Irish Famine: a single family moving between Ireland and Wales, carrying their hopes and hardships with them. But it represents countless others whose lives followed similar paths, their histories scattered across records and memories. 

And Macroom and Merthyr? Their part in the local history of the Great Irish Famine is reflected in other towns, other communities. It's not exceptional, but it’s precisely through this ordinariness that it illuminates how Irish families navigated famine, migration, and authority in the 19th century. 

But what of your own Irish ancestors, and the places connected to their story? Delve deeper into family history records and newspapers to uncover it.