Source Information
About Irish Emigrants in North America, 1775-1825
Emigration from Ireland to the Americas can be said to have started in earnest during the early eighteenth century. In 1718 the first successful emigration from Ireland to New England took place, laying the foundation for the large-scale settlement of colonial America by the "Scotch-Irish." (A number of groups of Irish settlers had emigrated during the seventeenth century, some of them involuntarily, to the West Indies.) Some early Irish emigrants came as indentured servants, often via ports such as Bristol and London. The scale of Irish immigration, particularly from the north of Ireland, would grow from a trickle in 1718 to a torrent in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the Great Famine.
This present work is a consolidated reprint of two pamphlets by Mr. David Dobson that shed light on more than 1,100 Irish men and women and their families who emigrated to North America between roughly 1775 and 1825. As such, this volume adds to the list of 1,000 men and women compiled by Mr. Dobson in three earlier pamphlets in this series, which were published by Clearfield Company as Irish Emigrants in North America. Unlike the earlier collection, which was derived from a variety of Scottish and North American source records, the persons named in Irish Emigrants in North America, Parts Four and Five, were found primarily in contemporary newspapers in Canada and the United States. Each of the two lists of Irish persons is arranged alphabetically by the emigrant's surname and, in the majority of cases, provides us with most of the following particulars: name, date of birth, name of ship, occupation in Ireland, reason for emigration, sometimes place of origin in Ireland, place of disembarkation in the New World, date of arrival, number of persons in the household, and the source of the information.