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Family Legacy Object For my family legacy project I chose two illustrations that represent both my family’s and my own personal im/migration journeys. Both period illustrations show movement as a response to change. My family (at lease the McCoy half) came to America from Ireland during the hard times of the potato famine in the mid-1800s. Because my family’s migrant roots are so old, I, like most others in my family, do not identify with being “Irish” all that much. Besides the last name and a couple of rowdy beer drinkers and redheads, there is nothing all that Irish about my family at all. Being from Mississippi, I identify myself as being more “Southern” than anything else. My entire family is from the Deep South, and rather than eating corned beef and cabbage, our family get-togethers almost always consist of fried chicken and sweet tea, among other Southern delicacies. But my Irish ancestors and I still have something in common: we both moved as a response to disaster. While I was not around for the potato famine, I was around for another disaster: Hurricane Katrina. And last fall, after the hurricane battered and destroyed much of New Orleans and Mississippi, I, like many in the Gulf States, chose to pack up and move. There illustrations I have chosen represent both my ancestors and my own migration as a response to disasters in history.
In this painting by Samual B. Waugh, Irish immigrants debark at New York in 1847 vassun.vassar.edu/.../ FAMINE/Master/Waugh.html
This drawing, called "Scattered by the Wind," appeared in my local paper in Mississippi after the hurricane. The scattering of the dandelion depicts the scattering of people from the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina (drawing by Marshall Ramsey - The Clarion-Ledger) |
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