Book Review: Irish Emigrants in North America

David Dobson. Irish Emigrants in North America: Consolidated Edition Parts One to Ten. Baltimore, Maryland: Clearfield Co. by Genealogical Publishing Co., 2023.

David Dobson’s series on Irish Emigrants was published in several parts spanning over a few decades.  The consolidated edition was published in 2023, and has assembled all ten parts together, with a newly created full index for quick reference. The full book has about 8500 names of Irish emigrants, along with a few lines of identifying information, amounting to nearly 900 pages and weighing nearly a kilogram (and it’s a soft cover!)

Different sources were consulted for each volume, including newspapers, journal articles, and archival records in North America and European repositories, covering emigrants mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. I was able to find several known or potential people-of-interest listed, which is always exciting.

Each listing has a citation after it, which while sometimes enough, is often agonizingly brief. While you’ll appreciate the brevity for every listing that does not relate to your ancestor, keeping the page count to a minimum, for your own ancestor, you’d prefer more detail on how to get to the original record. Every time information from original records is recopied, it introduces an opportunity for error. So we want to use this book as a finding aid, and we ultimately want to review the original records for ourselves, to verify the contents, and to see if there might be more details that couldn’t be included in the book.

A few names & details from a book page

Some of the citation issues are minor, such as understanding that the Public Records Office in London has been renamed the National Archives since the original volumes were published. Or figuring out that what the book cites as PRONI.T3424.1, will actually be found in PRONI’s (Public Records Office of North Ireland) online catalogue under T3424/1, while entering T3424.1 won’t bring up anything.

Other citations are trickier to track down. I was happy to find my ancestor David Conroy, a Peter Robinson settler who came to Canada in 1825, in Part 1 of the book. I already have quite a bit of information on his emigration since it was government sponsored and therefore well-documented.  It was strange, however, that David’s surname was spelled with our modern spelling “Conroy” in the book, because in the original Peter Robinson papers, it was usually spelled “Conry”. The book's citation was BPP.2.417, which according to the legend was “British Parliamentary Papers, 1968”. I’m curious why an 1825 immigrant might have been mentioned in the British Parliament papers in 1968, but that might explain why the modern spelling was used. So far, I haven’t been able to find the associated records in Hansard or the UK Parliamentary Archives catalogue, but I have sent the archives an email requesting guidance. So in some cases a bit of digging may be required.

I came across another tricky issue trying to find some individuals whose successful arrival in North America was recorded in the Belfast Newsletter. The book index gives us the date of the ship’s landing, but not the date the information was published in the paper, and there was usually a delay of several months between the two dates. While the Belfast Newsletter has been digitized at FindMyPast, unfortunately, the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on that website was often not able to locate the names I searched for. I used a work-around by finding others in the book who were noted to have arrived on the same ship, and searching for their names instead, and sometimes the OCR was able to pull up the article that way.

The Belfast News-Letter, 26 Nov 1771, p. 3, col 2; accessed via FindMyPast. The OCR could read Hans & since it is an unusual name in Ireland, it was easy to find this article when using his name as the search-term.

Particularly for the people that the OCR could not locate, without Dobson’s book, I’d never have known they were listed in this newspaper in the first place, meaning that the book is a very valuable resource even when some of the sources indexed have now been digitized.

Similarly, I was quite pleased that the book led me to obscure sources, including one of University of Glasgow alumni, and another naming state-aided emigrants circa 1850 from various Irish counties. Although I was able to find both items digitized using the provided source citations, I wouldn’t have known to go check either source without the book pointing me there. Obviously, the book’s information gleaned from paper records held in archives around the world, that will probably never be digitized, is more valuable still.

Who is this book best for?

1.        Genealogical libraries

Probably many good genealogical libraries already have a copy of at least a few of the individual volumes that were published separately over the years. If they don’t have them all, this might be a good time to purchase the consolidated edition, and downsize the individual books, letting people easily search one mega source.

2.        People who don’t have any idea where in Ireland their ancestor came from

In genealogy, we always start with what we know. So that involves researching our Irish ancestor in North American records, hoping to make the connection back to Ireland. If we already know the townland where they originated, we can jump fairly quickly into Irish records. For many of us, that just doesn’t happen, so a book like this could give us a hint that might jumpstart our research.

3.        People whose ancestor has a very common name

If you are researching a John Connor who came to Ontario sometime before 1850, you could have some tough work ahead of you. If you can’t figure out where he came from through consulting Canadian records, you may need to start researching all the John Connors and O’Connors in Ontario, or maybe further afield, trying to rule out everyone who couldn’t be your man. That’s a lot of work! This book can quickly point you towards some of the John Connors who were around at the time, who you can then research more deeply.

4.        People whose ancestor has a rare name

If you’re lucky, and your ancestor’s name is rare, then it might be easy to use this book to quickly leapfrog to the original source, and hopefully discover information that can be tied to your ancestor.

Caveat: Despite having 8500 names, this is, of course, not a complete listing of Irish emigrants. Over a million came to North America during the potato famine alone. So don’t assume it’s your ancestor because the name is the same– PROVE IT! (or disprove it)

Note: Parts 1-6 of Irish Emigrants in North America are digitized on Ancestry in their database entitled “Irish Emigrants in North America, 1775-1825”, however, this only includes around a third of the pages found in the new consolidated edition.

Note: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.