Abstract

This dissertation, conceived within the research-creation stream of Concordia University’s interdisciplinary Humanities program, considers the spatial, social, emotional, and cultural journey of emigration, place-making, and return-migration that the last four generations of my maternal family have undertaken between Ireland and Montreal, Canada from the late 1920s to the present day. Drawing from the fields of Oral History and Narrative, Memory Studies, Irish Studies, and Creative Nonfiction (studio component), this project begins by reconstructing the circumstances surrounding my maternal great-grandmother Norah’s emigration from her home in County Mayo, Ireland to Montreal, Quebec where she raised my grandmother Rose as a single mother during the Great Depression. The narrative then follows the subsequent generations of my family, and their emplaced memories in Montreal: from Rose’s upbringing in a series of downtown rooming-houses, to my mother and uncles’ childhood among the laneways and cold-water flats of the working-class neighborhood of Point St. Charles in the 1950s and ‘60s. The project concludes with an essay of place that recounts my experience of visiting my great-grandmother’s home-place in Shrule parish, as the first member of my family to “return” since emigration. To recreate the life-worlds of my family’s past, I draw upon oral history interviews with family members, including the mobile methodology of the walking interview; primary sources, such as ships’ records, photographs, and memory objects; secondary sources to contextualize my family’s experiences; and on-site explorations in Montreal and Ireland. Recounted in a narrative voice that blends description, analysis, and reflection, my dissertation situates itself at the intersection of what cultural historian Annette Kuhn calls “memory work”; “intimate ethnography,” a term coined by Alisse Waterston and Barbara Rylko-Bauer; and creative nonfiction.