 In 1854 Bishop Connolly of Saint John again contacted the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity at Mount St. Vincent in New York, to appeal for help with a poor population that included many recent immigrants who had left Ireland in the "Great Migration" of the 1847 Potato Famine.Many of them still felt the effects of the "ship's fever" typhus epidemic" from the crossing.Then in the summer of 1854, an epidemic of cholera broke out and 1,500 died, leaving many children orphaned.