From the register of Notre Dame Basilica, Montreal, the burial of four Irish orphans on 2 August 1847.1 Apparently all girls, their names unknown, and with only a guess as to their ages:
The record reads (in translation):
The second of August eighteen hundred and forty-seven I the undersigned priest have buried four Irish (female) orphans who died the day before yesterday and yesterday at the Bon Pasteur Monastery of this city, one of them aged about ten years, two of them aged about eight years, and the other aged about six years. Witnesses Benjamin Desroches and Isidore Godin who have declared that they cannot sign. Nercam, priest.
These orphans (and their parents) were no doubt victims of the typhus epidemic of 1847, which killed thousands at Grosse Île, and which also spread to other Canadian cities, including Montreal, Ottawa (Bytown), Kingston, and Toronto.
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Basilique Notre-Dame (Montréal, Québec), Register of Births, Marriages and Burials, 1847, image 184 of 309, S.S.S.S. Orphelines Irlandaises (Burial of four Irish orphans): database, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca/: accessed 13 March 2015), Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967. ↩
sad story and all too common i fear…. have you been to the burial site at Gross Isle? There is an etched glass wall with all the names (known and unknown) of those estimated 5000 that are buried on the other side of the wall. I was surprised at how powerful an image it was. I had gone for a stroll thru the graveyard to have some alone time and came back to find my girlfriend in tears looking thru a section of that wall that was etched completely with her surname …. very powerful.