[Pelham]

“Still, a bit more than half the people in this country of Irish descent never had an ancestor arrive pursuant to the famine ~ they came earlier, or they came later.”

I can attest to that. My Irish ancestors headed for North America due to Oliver Cromwell. They were landed Irish gentry near Cork and he took their land. Must have been around 1650, details are scarce. I can find the family name, which is rare, on old landmarks on the Delmarva peninsula.

[Oratam]

You might enjoy Cromwell In Ireland by RTE. It's very well done but sadly cut up into 10 minute segments on YouTube.

[muawiyah]

Forgot to mention it but there were SEVERAL famines in the 1800s. The first one occurs roughly between 1810 to 1813. That overlaps an exciting period in the Napoleonic Wars. It usually isn't mentioned as part of European history since it only hit the European Arctic, parts of Western Russia, and Central Asia ~ with a huge chunk of Siberia and China.

Virtually all the Sa'ami in the Sapma moved West and South out of the Kola peninsula. Siberia was denuded of animals all the way to the Pacific. That's one of the reasons the fur hunters traveled all the way around Siberia on the Arctic passage (in season) to get furs in Alaska. They also found they needed to buy vegetables for human consumption from the Spanish in the San Francisco Bay region.

Every now and then someone will mention a famine in the late 1700s ~ but it's not well documented so no one knows where it hit.