The barque, Jeanie Johnston, sitting at dock on Dublin’s River Liffey, is a replica of a ship built in Canada in 1847 and later sold to Irish merchant John Donovan of County Kerry. Donovan’s original intent was not to haul human cargo, but rather than sail empty on its voyages to North America to purchase timber, he chose to assist the hundreds of thousands of starving Irish waiting to flee their homeland during the worst potato famine Ireland has ever known.

Unlike many who transported victims of the famine to North and South America and Australia, Captain James Attridge did not operate a “coffin ship.” He never carried more than 254 passengers—the maximum number steerage could comfortably handle with five people sharing a six-foot by six-foot bunk—and had a qualified doctor on board who knew how to prevent typhoid and cholera and insisted on regular hygiene. While Donovan owned the Jeanie Johnston, between 1848 and 1855, the ship did not lose a single passenger on its sixteen voyages to Quebec, New York, and Baltimore.

My great-grandmother, Anna Fife (likely age ten at the time), her sister Isabelle (age 20?) and brother Edward (age 7?) were fortunate to be aboard a ship, the Lady Franklin, with such a captain who insisted on the well being of his passengers. The Lady Franklin was a larger ship than the Jeanie Johnston. Launched in 1851, the same year Anna and her siblings sailed, it could comfortably carry 400 to 500 passengers. And it was a steamer, which gave it the advantage of speed. The shorter the voyage, the less time exposed to disease. Regardless, thirteen people died on Anna’s voyage.

Sometimes I take for granted that I am on this planet, especially when I consider how healthy my parents were and the overall quality of healthcare in the 20th century. But when I think back three generations—to a woman who was just a name I found inscribed inside the front cover of the family Bible twenty years ago, but who is also the mother of my more tangible grandmother and the grandmother of my very tangible father—I have to marvel at the tenuousness of life and consider how fortunate I am to be here at all. I think about how brave our Anna was to step foot on a ship that was to take her away from all she knew, in a day when people did not leave home. She had no way of knowing that fifteen years later in New York, she would meet and marry an Irishman from her home county of Londonderry and they would have ten children together. She risked so much in search of a better life, and, as a result, laid the path for mine. For that, I am grateful.