Hello, Everyone, Dr. Ciaran Reilly's important new book, Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine, from Four Courts Press is now listed on Amazon for pre-orders. The paperback is $28.45 and pre-orders guarantee you the lowest price between now and its publication at the end of October. The book is the first comprehensive look at the Mahon estate records and we in the Ballykilcline Society have eagerly awaited it. Ciaran, with whom we have been working for some while, has said the book includes 175 images of estate documents. He is the scholar from the National University of Ireland at Maynooth who has been charged with reviewing, cataloging, and analyzing the Mahon estate archive in conjunction with the Famine Museum and the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates. He also is the organizer of the Famine Museum's annual conference on the Famine. The book likely should interest anyone who had famine-era emigrants, not only descendants of those from the Strokestown area. Here's Amazon's blurb on the book: "The Strokestown Park Archive is one of the largest estate collections in existence with more than 50,000 documents comprising rentals, leases, accounts, correspondence maps, drawings, architectural plans and photographs. Of particular importance are the papers that relate to the Great Irish Famine. This book aims to introduce the reader to the archive and to provide an microscopic insight into the many and varied experiences of Famine for those who inhabited the estate in the 1840s. Documents from the archive, many of which have not seen the light of day since they were generated almost 170 years ago, illuminate the text and provide the reader with a unique insight into Famine Ireland. Although the 1990s (and later) witnessed an outpouring of scholarly work on the Great Famine to commemorate the sesquicentenary, only a handful of studies examined the impact of Famine on individual landed estates. In the social memory of the Great Famine at Strokestown, the assisted emigration of 1,490 people to Canada, the murder of Major Denis Mahon in 1847 and the subsequent clearance of as many as 3,000 tenants from the estate between 1848 to 1851 predominates. While, it is certainly true that the emigration schemes and the clearances caused considerable unrest, which contributed to the murder of Denis Mahon, social memory, if left untested, can hide many other complexities of the Famine. The existence of the Strokestown Famine archive highlights that there are still major questions to be answered in relation to the greatest social calamity in modern Irish history. For example, how widespread and effective were local efforts to alleviate the plight of the impoverished? How did the local community react to the clearance of thousands of people? Who benefited from these clearances? How did those who emigrated fare in their receiving communities? This book attempts to answer some of these crucial questions." Best Wishes to All, Mary Lee Dunn