EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Three families

Irish historian Damian Shiels brings us the story of three men who fought and died on the Nwe Bern Battlfield in 1862, who were all Irish and part of the Kerry diaspora of the 19th century.

(Irish American Civil War, approx 15 mins reading time)

These three men were united by more than their shared-death, their regiment, or their home state. For all were also part of New York’s Kerry diaspora- the county where both John and Felix had been born. Their deaths at New Bern precipitated the creation of a document trail that draws back the veil not just on their lives, but those of their families, and the wider Kerry community in the Empire State. In addition to telling those stories, these narratives also reveal wider perspectives; not the least of which is the the fact that even where emigrants shared strikingly similar backgrounds and backstories, each individual’s prospects and fortunes could be remarkaby variable.

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>