Briarhill to Brooklyn is a work of creative nonfiction, in which I tell the story of my Irish family’s journey from County Galway on a coffin ship named Cushlamachree. Their destination was Brooklyn.     

The main characters are real people, and the locations, events and timelines are historically accurate. Some of the book is fact, but most is fiction sewn together with factual places, names, and dates.  

Briarhill to Brooklyn relates what I have imagined about my family’s lives between 1848 and 1902.      

The prologue sets the stage for the immigrants’ story, using the retrospective voice of a first-person narrator, as he describes his boyhood memory of the family crowding around a table in their Irish cottage for another meal of boiled potatoes. The storyteller recalls his mam talking to his da. 

“’John, do todhchaí ár bpáistí, ní mór dúinn dul go Meiriceá.”… ‘John, for the future of our children, we must go to America.’”     

British parliament’s role in the starvation of the Irish people is clear from the opening pages, and you will understand the tragic conditions in famine-era Galway as the narrator relates the startling images he encounters walking through the ancient city.      

Early chapters establish several storylines, and the first half of the book is consumed by the family’s last days in Ireland, the steerage voyage across the Atlantic, and the Cushlamachree’s landing in New York. An unimaginable hurdle confronts the family after they arrive in Brooklyn, but the siblings survive and manage to assimilate into New York’s melting pot.       

The most significant event that transpired in America after the Bodkins arrived in 1848 was the Civil War, and several chapters of Briarhill to Brooklyn detail the impact the war had on the family.      

The journey I describe in Briarhill to Brooklyn—fleeing Ireland, steerage, a new life in Brooklyn, Civil War, prosperity—has caused many American Irish immigrants to think, “This is my family.”