The former immigration centre at Ellis Island.
When pursuing Irish ancestral research it helps to discover what happened to members of the family who might have emigrated, for where gaps in the Irish records might appear, those in an adopted homeland may well compensate. It can also be a source of great pride to discover the achievements of cousins in new lands facing different challenges to your own branch of the family – and to perhaps discover that while an accent or nationality may change over time, the blood certainly does not.
The connections with Britain have been well documented in this book, but the Moving Here website from the UK National Archives also has a category on Irish migration at http://movinghere.org.uk/galleries/histories/irish/irish.htm.
The Irish diaspora is huge and to this day maintains a strong connection to its ancestral homeland. The Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project at www.dippam.ac.uk is a joint venture between Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Ulster, the Centre for Migration Studies, and Libraries Northern Ireland. It provides a fascinating range of resources on emigration (primarily to North America) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, including an ‘Irish Emigration Database’ with diaries, journals, folklore and newspaper extracts, and the ‘Voices of Migration and Return’ oral history project, with many audio recordings and transcripts of those who travelled. The Centre for Migration Studies based in Omagh has a comprehensive links page at www.qub.ac.uk/cms/admin/links.htm for additional resources, with some of its Irish Emigration Database records also available on the pay-per-view Roots Ireland site. The Irish Diaspora website (www.irishdiaspora.net) is another academic project from the University of Leeds, with many diverse essays and links on various aspects to do with the study of the Irish abroad.
For passenger lists the Find my Past UK website offers a useful starting point with its ‘Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890–1960’ collection, sourced from the National Archives’ Board of Trade records at Kew. This offers records for all those who sailed from British and Irish ports between 1890 and 1921, and British ports only from 1922 to 1960. The site also carries a separate ‘Register of Passport Applications’ from 1851 to 1856, 1858 to 1862 and 1874 to 1903. Note that travellers from the United Kingdom did not have to hold a passport until 1914, so these were granted upon request.
Not every passenger who sailed abroad remained, while some who did settle overseas made return trips – for these you can find a parallel set of records from 1890 to 1960 on Ancestry, via its ‘UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878–1960’ collection. Ancestry also hosts a great many additional resources for emigration, including immigration records, naturalisation papers, vital records and subsequent censuses for various countries, particularly the United States, Canada and Australia. Find my Past Ireland also has the extremely useful ‘Transatlantic Migration from North America to Britain & Ireland 1858–1870’ database – a detailed background to the politics behind this collection is available at http://tinyurl.com/transatlanticreturns. The same database is offered at Irish Origins.
Further passenger lists for North America, Australia and New Zealand can be accessed via www.germanroots.com/onlinelists.html and at www.theshipslist.com. Additional lists from Ulster can also be found at www.ulsterancestry.com/ua-free-pages.php.
Ellis Island in New York maintained an immigration centre from 1892 to 1954, with the first immigrant to pass through its doors being Cork-born lass Annie Moore. To search those who arrived from Ireland, visit www.ellisisland.org. An alternative way to search this database is to go through the JewishGen portal at www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB. For earlier arrivals to New York (between 1820 and 1892) you can try the centre’s predecessor facility at Castle Garden, with a database at www.castlegarden.org.
For the Famine period, the US National Archives has two useful collections, the ‘Famine Irish Passenger Record Data File 1846–51 (FIPAS)’ and the ‘List of Ships that Arrived at the Port of New York 1846–51’, both of which can be consulted at http://aad.archives.gov/aad/seriesdescription.jsp?s=639&cat=all&bc=sl. An additional resource for the US Irish diaspora is the Irish Abroad website’s ‘Roots’ page at www.irishabroad.com/Irish-Roots.
The former immigration centre at Ellis Island.
A general gateway site for United States resources is the US GenWeb site at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/usgenweb. The Library of Congress Online Catalog at http://catalog.loc.gov can help to source many American publications, photos and media of interest, while the National Archives (www.archives.gov) has a great quantity of guides and resources on its site for genealogical research. For a list of state archives, visit www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/state-archives.html, and a guide to state historical societies is found at www.stenseth.org/us/statehs.html.
The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA) in Massachusetts may also be of help at http://tiara.ie. This hosts an online surname database for its members’ interests, as well as providing inscriptions from several cemeteries in the state listing an Irish birthplace, and resources on the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters.
Those who sailed to Canada faced additional hardships apart from the long journey by sea. At Grosse Île over 100,000 Irish migrants arrived in 1847 and endured a major outbreak of typhus, with well over 5,000 buried at the quarantine station. The story of the tragedy is at www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/natcul/natcul1/b.aspx, and a memorial database can be found at www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/natcul/natcul4.aspx.
Many other Canadian passenger lists and immigration resources can be found at the Library and Archives Canada site at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca, as well as a database of ‘Home Children’ who arrived in the country between 1869 and 1930. These were predominantly orphaned children sent by the British Government from the UK to new homes across its empire, though in some cases parents and children were misled as to the fate of the other prior to their separation. The database includes hundreds sent from poor law unions and charitable institutions in Ireland. A further resource for Canadian-destined Home Children is located at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~britishhomechildren. The Child Migrants Trust (www.childmigrantstrust.com) helps many who were transported overseas in more recent times to re-establish contact with family members, including many from Northern Ireland.
The National Archives of Australia (www.naa.gov.au) offers a comprehensive online guide for tracing immigrants to its shores through its ‘Family History’ section, accessible from the home page. The country’s National Library site (www.nla.gov.au) hosts a detailed guide also for all Australian state libraries and archives, as well as vital records access, cemeteries databases, convicts databases and more – access this through the ‘Quicklinks’ section at the bottom of the home page. The library’s impressive Trove facility (http://trove.nla.gov.au) is also well worth searching, particularly for its millions of digitised images from newspapers across the continent. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography can be consulted at http://adbonline.anu.edu.au.
For convicts who were sent to Australia, the National Archives of Ireland has an ‘Ireland-Australia Transportation database’ featuring almost 39,000 Irish people at www.nationalarchives.ie/research/archives-held-in-the-national-archives/introduction/, while Down County Museum’s website (www.downcountymuseum.com) hosts two convicts databases of prisoners from the county who were transported to Australia.
Patricia Downes’ Australian Pioneers site at http://members.pcug.org.au/~pdownes carries a list of Irish convicts sent to New South Wales from 1788 to 1849, and the State Library of Queensland’s Convicts Transportation Registers database is available at www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts/about. Find my Past UK has a ‘Convict Arrivals in New South Wales 1788–1842’ database, and The Genealogist also has several convicts-based resources including the names of Irish prisoners.
A blog for publishing company Irish Wattle may also be of interest at http://irishwattle.blogspot.co.uk.
The New Zealand Society of Genealogists’ platform at www.genealogy.org.nz contains a ‘Shipping Database’ from 1840 to 1975 and a ‘First Families Index’ which can help you to pursue the earliest migrants to the country. Pearl’s Pad (http://pearlspad.net.nz) equally has many historical resources for tracing migration, and PapersPast (http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast) freely offers 2 million digitised newspaper pages from 1839 to 1945.
The New Zealand Government has a Births, Deaths and Marriages Online site at www.bdmonline.dia.govt.nz which provides indexes for historical vital events, namely births prior to a hundred years ago, marriages prior to eighty years ago and deaths prior to fifty years ago (or at least for those with a date of birth at least eighty years ago). Archives New Zealand has a catalogue on its site at www.archway.archives.govt.nz and includes access to details of New Zealand Defence Force records, some of which are digitised. The New Zealand History Online site at www.nzhistory.net.nz includes a war memorials register with some 450 sites listed. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography has some 3,000 biographical entries at www.dnzb.govt.nz.
An often forgotten part of Ireland’s diaspora is that which settled in South America, but over 40,000 Irish people migrated there in the nineteenth century. Half moved on again to the US, Australia and elsewhere, but some 20,000 remained in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, with their descendants today estimated to be around half a million strong. Among those to make their mark was the founder of the Argentinian Navy, William Brown, a Mayo man born in Foxford in 1777. The Society for Irish Latin American Studies has an excellent Dictionary of Latin American Biography at www.irlandeses.org/bios1.htm to help tell their story. Other resources on the site include passenger lists and detailed essays on the settlers’ stories.
A late nineteenth-century postcard from Mary Gorman of Three Bridges, Kilkenny, and family.
The Irish in Europe (http://irishineurope.ie/vre) is a project hosted by the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, in County Kildare. The site contains four biographical databases of folk who worked in Europe, including 16,000 soldiers who served in the French army in the eighteenth century, a Spanish military database with 15,000 names, a University of Louvain database with 1,200 students from Ireland who studied there in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and a similar database of 1,500 names for those who studied at the Universities of Paris and Toulouse.
Datasets coming soon include Irish naval personnel in French and Spanish service in the early modern period, Irish officers in the French Service in the eighteenth century, Irish law students at the Inns of Court in London during the seventeenth century, Irish medical students at the University of Rheims in the eighteenth century, and the Irish in Paris hospitals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And finally, do have a look at the Ireland Reaching Out project at www.irelandxo.com. It was initially established in Galway as a project to try to trace the diaspora, rather than have the diaspora try to trace folk in Ireland, but the concept is now spreading across the country. The site offers many resources including a forum to post interests and the chance to keep up-to-date with developments for your area of interest, as well as the annual Week of Welcomes. There is also a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/IrelandXO.
