My late husband was from a family of 10 children. His father had died and left a pregnant wife behind with 8 of them.
They lived in a thatched cottage in Galway and there were the 10 kids, his mother, his uncle and also his grandparents that lived through the Great Hunger and died in the 1940's at the ages of 104 and 106 years respectively.
All of these people in a two room cottage!
When he got older, him and his brother rebuilt the family home and left. They ended up in New York and gradually found their way west to San Francisco which is where my own family was.
My family sailed around the Cape Horn to San Francisco during the Gold Rush years. I've found stories about them in the old San Francisco newspapers which are now online.
Its all right there, obituaries and marriage records.
Many of them were bookkeepers and a few were carpenters like my late husband was.
They had hard lives and managed to go on. How I'll never know.
My father was a proud Irishman. He was Catholic, but only to a point. 
I have a few cousins left in San Francisco that are 2nd and 3rd.
As for my mother's family, she was basically from Appalachia and was also Irish and a few other things; an American is what she was.
We go on and continue to fight. That is because we must and it is because of this racism towards the Irish that obviously still exists today. How sad is this exactly? 
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