Rooney Family Tree

John died on the ship from Ireland. The dead are customarily buried at sea, but the story is that Thomas, his father, had become friends with the captain and convinced him to let them land before they buried John. He's buried at Grosse-╬le, Canada, a small island in the St. Lawrence River just downstream from Quebec City. Today it appears to be a largely unoccupied island with a few hotels and is the Irish Memorial National Historic site of Canada.

"Death put a period to her existence," writes Robert Whyte in his "1847 Famine Ship Diary," book. It's the diary of a six-week trip from Dublin to Canada by 110 desperate and wretched Irish immigrants, many of whom may have been sick at the start of journey, though they were supposedly first examined by a doctor. So many died on board, and their sickness was often and simply due to bad water and provisions, resulting cholera and other diseases, and were buried at sea.

However, once they entered the St. Lawrence seaway, they did not dump the bodies overboard because the many islands there and the tide coming in would have resulted in them washing up on shore. So they saved them to bury on Grosse ╬sle, the quarantine island just below Ottawa. And one of the Rooney children was buried there û John Rooney, about two years old and the son of Thomas Rooney and Ellen Ward and grandson of Daddy Mick and Mammy Kitty, was buried there in 1847, perhaps the most difficult year of the Irish immigration.