Growing up in Coal Country

I have been doing research on my family's history for several years. I have an account on Ancestry.com and with the resources available there as well as some helpful people in that community, I've been able to trace my mother's family (the Kennedy's) back to the 1700's in Ireland. My mother immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s so I have to rely mostly on Irish records for information on her side. I can also trace my father's side of the family back to Ireland on the Devlin side and to Lithuania on his mother's side. My dad's Irish ancestors arrived in this country in 1872 and settled in Plains, and his mother's parents (Simonitis) settled in Pringle sometime around 1892, according to a ship's manifest I found in the Ellis Island database.

I was able to piece most of my family tree together with census records. On both sides of his family, my father's earliest relatives were employed in the coal mines. It made me curious about the conditions of working in the mines around the turn of the century so I found a book from a local author that I thought you might enjoy reading, particularly if your ancestors were involved in coal mining. It's called 'Growing up in Coal Country' by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. Her husband's family is from NEPA so she had the benefit of interviewing many family members directly. She did a great job in describing the conditions of the mines when many of our ancestors settled in Wyoming Valley.

I also noticed that the author also wrote a book on the Irish potato famine called Black Potatoes, and since I am 3/4 Irish, I have been quite curious about how the famine affected Ireland and its people and why it happened. I've visited Ireland several times and so I've gotten some indication that the prevailing attitude among the Irish is that the famine was the fault of the British who had seized land from the Irish and worked them like sharecroppers, allowing them only enough land for their own use that they had no choice but to grow a crop like the potato, which has much larger caloric yield per acre than cash crops like wheat and barley. Those grain crops were grown on the majority of the property and then harvested by the tenant farmers only to be shipped off to England to pay the rent for the small portion of land they were allotted on which grow their own crops.

I think the author did an excellent job describing all the conditions that made for this disaster and gave a fair assessment of how the blights started and what the effects were on the population of Ireland during the years 1845-1850. I highly recommend both of these books.