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Show Night of the Big Wind Dated Lives of Irish Many Americans whose grandparents grand-parents were born in Ireland have heard these elders speak of the night of the big wind. As some of the ancestors referred to it as the date of their birth the youngsters may have regarded it as a bit of frivolous avoidance of fact. But there was such a night, recalls the New Ybrk Sun. It began about 11 o'clock on the night of January 6, 1839f and continued con-tinued until after daylight the next morning. ; Limerick and the Dublin neighborhood suffered heavily. Two hundred houses were blown down and as many more were burned. Twenty persons were killed in these catastrophes and 100 were drowned. The coasts of Ireland and western England were lined with wrecks. As Ireland did not keep vital statistics sta-tistics until 1860, the night of the big wind was used as the base of many claims made under the old-age old-age pension act 30 years ago. The Irish Digest reprints some paragraphs para-graphs from "Things Past Redress," Re-dress," a book by Augustine Birrell, who went to Ireland as chief secretary secre-tary in 1907: "It was a wonderful wind! Dickens Dick-ens alone could have done it justice. It ought to have blown itself out in 1839. but there it still was, sweeping sweep-ing pension officers and local gov ernment officials off their feet in 1908. Question any old man as to his claim, and you learned that his age had gone astray on him, but he was a fine, hardy lad on the night of the big wind!" As news distribution, like the collection col-lection of vital statistics, was in its infancy in 1839, the readers of the Sun did not learn of the calamitous happenings in Ireland until the arrival ar-rival of the packet ship Cambridge on February 13, and that news was limited to what had happened near Liverpool, whence the Cambridge sailed. Three days later the Great Western reached Nsw York with further details, but these were not as lively as the announcement of Victoria's engagement to Albert, which also arrived on the Great Western. |