Grandmother Remembers Grosse Ile

"A Grandmother Remembers Grosse Île, by Jeannette Vekeman Masson, translated by Johanne L. Massé. Madame Masson lived on Grosse Ile for ten years before World War I when her father Gustave Vekeman was interpreter of European languages at the Quarantine Station. The book is a flowing account of life in an ordinary village on an extraordinary island. This was the image of a Canada that would first impress the immigrants obliged to stop on account of sickness on board their ships. Vekeman mentions the unveiling of the forty-foot tall Celtic Cross, a ceremony which she attended with her father." -- from ://carraigbooks.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/a-grandmother-remembers-grosse-ile/ "Grosse Isle (French: Grosse Île, "big island"), is located in Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec, Canada. It is one of the islands of the 21-island Isle-aux-Grues archipelago. It is part of the municipality of Saint-Antoine-de-l'Isle-aux-Grues, located in the Chaudière-Appalaches region of the province. Also known as Grosse Isle and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site, the island was the site of an immigration depot which predominantly housed Irish immigrants coming to Canada to escape the Great Famine, 1845-1849. In 1832, the Lower Canadian Government had previously set up this depot to contain an earlier cholera epidemic that was believed to be caused by the large influx of European immigrants, and the station was reopened in the mid-Nineteenth Century to accommodate Irish migrants who had contracted typhus during their voyages. Thousands of Irish were quarantined on Grosse Isle from 1832 to 1848. It is believed that over 3000 Irish died on the island and over 5000[2] are currently buried in the cemetery there; many died en route. Most who died on the island were infected with typhus, which sprang up from the conditions there in 1847. Grosse Isle is the largest burial ground for refugees of the Great Hunger outside Ireland. After Canadian Confederation in 1867, the buildings and equipment were modernized to meet the standards of the new Canadian government's immigration policies. The island is sometimes called Canada's Ellis Island, although this term is also used to describe the Pier 21 immigration facility in Halifax."--Wikiped., July 2014.