Briarhill to Brooklyn: An Irish Family's Journey to Freedom and Opportunity

In Amazon’s # 7 Best Seller in Historical British and Irish Literature (12/9/22), Briarhill to Brooklyn debut author Jack Bodkin, tells the story of an Irish family’s 1848 journey to freedom and opportunity.

Publishers Weekly BookLife—Editor’s Pick Review—“The memorable account of an Irish family’s journey to America, lovingly told.”

The Journal of the New York Irish History Roundtable Review by Brendan O’Hagan—Briarhill to Brooklyn “…addresses many subjects relevant to students of Irish history in New York, such as their dangerous crossing on a coffin ship, the role of Irish immigrants in the Civil War, and the transnational networks of support that immigrants created.…a fast paced story…may inspire readers to imagine the resilience, fears, and hopes of their own immigrant ancestors.”

The journey begins in Galway…

For three years a mysterious potato blight devastated Ireland’s clacháns, 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.