Hello, blog readers and Stuff You Missed in History Class listeners! I’m Katie, and it’s lovely to meet you.

As July 4th approaches and those of us in the U.S. think about what it means to be an American, I got to thinking about my family’s own personal lore. Among the courtship stories, great grandmotherly advice about avoiding gluttony and various legends of familial bad seeds, there’s also the story of my ancestors who left Ireland during the Great Potato Famine. As with many family tales, I’m not sure this is actually true, but it did inspire me to do a little historical digging about the famine that has figured so largely in my own history.

In 1845, Irish peasants were very poor, and Catholics like my antecedents could only rent land, not buy it. Potatoes were the best option for survival on these little plots, so about half of Ireland’s people were living off them, according to Digital History.