Introducing My Project- Girls After Grey: Workhouse Forced Emigration
- Karlee Twiner
- Jun 12
- 3 min read
Back in 2023, I was working at the Irish Family History Centre and, on occasion, Eneclann helping people connect with their Irish heritage. During my time there, I was invited to help Fiona Fitzsimons with her weekly Facebook Live. She would answer questions that people had submitted beforehand as some required some looking into. She assigned me a few questions to research, and one of them has stuck with me ever since.
One of her followers had asked if we could look into whether the research down by a volunteer society on a girl named Ellen Egan was correct. The society called The Primrose Project was trying to trace girls who were sent from the Mount Bellew workhouse in 1853 to Canada. They had found two girls, and Ellen Egan was the one they highlighted the most.
However, after just a few minutes of researching, I found that the Ellen Egan they traced in Canada was not the same one as the Ellen Egan who was in the workhouse in Galway. After sharing this information with Fiona she told me about the Earl Grey Scheme, which occurred during the Famine. However, that scheme ended in 1850.
The Earl Grey Scheme consisted of sending several thousand young women from Irish workhouses between 1848 and 1850. They were sent to Australia with the intent that they would eventually marry as Australia at the time was populated mainly by men. During this time period, the number of people in the workhouses often far exceeded the numbers that they were meant to hold. Thus, the scheme was born to relieve the workhouse of the people who were deemed the most likely to remain burdens on the rate payers, young women between the ages of 15 and 25. The girls sent from Mount Bellew were of a similar age range but were sent to Canada three years after the Earl Grey Scheme ended. It seems that we had stumbled upon a continuation of sorts.
Ever since I have been intrigued by this forced emigration, and I've started a project that may take a while. I am documenting all the orphan girls who were sent from Irish workhouses after 1850 in large numbers. I began my search with 1853 since that is when Ellen Egan and the other 54 girls were sent from Mount Bellew. So far, I have found over 700 more girls sent from various workhouses all over Ireland
in that same year. The number keeps growing.
Unfortunately, many workhouse records are lost to time, so many of the girls will remain nameless, but I hope to at least bring to life their experiences, both good and bad. Because of the lack of workhouse records, I am relying heavily on newspaper records, which often reported on the minutes of the workhouse guardian meetings.
Names of girls were rarely reported, but they occasionally come through. If you have ancestors who were transported to either Canada or Australia from a workhouse, please reach out and contribute to this project. Even if the ancestor was not a young woman in one of these groups, I also appreciate having people to draw more information about the experience of emigration due to poverty. If you'd like to contribute, please visit this page and fill out the form OR simply email me at returntoeire@gmail.com
I will update this on occasion as I find more and more information and in a few years I hope to have this published as a book. This is what I typically research when I have the time during our Dublin Research Tours. Check out our tours and join me!
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