¹ Manifest of the Princeton, 11 June, 1852, (New York passenger lists, 1820–1957, Record Group 36, U.S. National Archives, accessed via Ancestry.com); family 506, 6th district of the Fourteenth Ward, 1855 New York state census (Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office, accessed via familysearch.org); test book and deposit ledgers for accounts 12,174, 17,871, 38,131, and 46,028, Emigrant Savings Bank (Emigrant Savings Bank papers, New York Public Library, accessed via Ancestry.com).

² Callahan, Nelson J. and Hickey, William F., The Irish Americans and their communities of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1978), p. 176Google Scholar; Shoemaker, Edward M., ‘Strangers and citizens: the Irish immigrant community of Savannah, 1837–1861’ (Ph.D. thesis, Emory University, 1990), p. 106Google Scholar; Anbinder, Tyler, Five Points: the nineteenth-century New York neighborhood that created tap dance, stole elections, and became the world’s most notorious slum (New York, 2001), p. 98Google Scholar.

³ Quotation from Gráda, Cormac Ó, Black ’47 and beyond: the Great Irish Famine in history, economy, and memory (Princeton, 1999), p. 228CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the most important works on the Famine Irish in America are Handlin, Oscar, Boston’s immigrants, 1790–1880: a study in acculturation (Cambridge, 1941)Google Scholar; Ernst, Robert, Immigrant life in New York City: 1825–1863 (1949; reprint ed., Syracuse, 1994)Google Scholar; Diner, Hasia R., Erin’s daughters in America: Irish immigrant women in the nineteenth century (Baltimore, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gallman, J. Matthew, Receiving Erin’s children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish famine migration, 1845–1855 (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Gleeson, David T., The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁴ Adams, William Forbes, Ireland and Irish emigrants to the New World from 1815 to the Famine (New Haven, 1932)Google Scholar; Schrier, Arnold, Ireland and the American emigration 1850–1900 (Minneapolis, 1958)Google Scholar; Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Mokyr, Joel, Why Ireland starved: an analytical and quantitative study of Irish poverty, 1800–1851 (Boston, 1983)Google Scholar; Kinealy, Christine, This great calamity: the Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Boulder, 1995)Google Scholar; Scally, Robert, The end of hidden Ireland: rebellion, famine, and emigration (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murchadha, Ciarán Ó, Sable wings over the land: Ennis, County Clare, and its wider community during the Great Famine (Ennis, 1998)Google Scholar; Moran, Gerard, Sending out Ireland’s poor: assisted emigration to North America in the 19^th century (Portland, 2004)Google Scholar; Gráda, Cormac Ó, Ireland’s Great Famine: interdisciplinary perspectives (Dublin, 2006)Google Scholar; Dunn, Mary Lee, Ballykilcline rising: from Famine Ireland to immigrant America (Amherst, 2008)Google Scholar; Murchadha, Ciarán Ó, The Great Famine: Ireland’s agony 1845–1852 (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. For an example of the observation that Irish emigration originated more in the north and east early on and more in the south and west toward the end of the Famine migration, see Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A new history of Ireland, v- Ireland Under the Union, I, 1801–70 (Oxford, 1989), pp 571Google Scholar, 608.

⁵ Cousens, S. H., ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846–1851’ in Transactions and papers of the Institute of British Geographers, xxviii (1960), pp 119–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cousens, , ‘The regional variation in emigration from Ireland between 1821 and 1841’ in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xxxvii (Dec. 1965), pp 15–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cousens, , ‘Emigration and demographic change in Ireland, 1851–1861’ in Economic History Review, new series, xiv (1961), pp 275–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Examples of scholars who have relied on Cousens’s data include MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘The Irish Famine emigration to the United States’ in Perspectives in American History, x (1976), pp 419–421Google Scholar; Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and exiles: Ireland and the Irish exodus to North America (New York, 1985), p. 297Google Scholar; Donnelly, James S. Jr., ‘Excess mortality and emigration’, in Vaughan (ed.), Ireland under the Union, I, 1801–70, p. 354Google Scholar; Cormac Ó Gráda and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Mass migration as disaster relief’, in Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine, p. 131.

⁶ Fitzpatrick, , ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, p. 620Google Scholar; Smyth, William J., ‘Exodus from Ireland – patterns of emigration’, in John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (New York, 2012), pp 496–497Google Scholar; Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘A note on nineteenth-century Irish emigration statistics’ in Population Studies, xxix (1975), pp 143–149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ David Fitzpatrick has calculated that only about 40 per cent of the Irish who lived outside of their county of birth in 1851 were residing in the United States. Another 20 per cent, he estimates, were living in other parts of Ireland, and the remaining 40 per cent had relocated to England, Canada, or Australia: Fitzpatrick, David, Irish emigration, 1801–1921 (Dublin, 1984), p. 6Google Scholar. But by 1851, approximately three-quarters of Irish emigrants were relocating to the U.S., though the proportion could vary significantly from year to year: Miller, , Emigrants and exiles, pp 570–579Google Scholar; Gráda, Ó, ‘Note on nineteenth-century Irish emigration statistics’, pp 143–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Erickson, Charlotte, ‘The uses of passenger lists for the study of British and Irish immigration’ in Ira A. Glazier and Luigi De Rosa (eds), Migration across time and nations: population mobility in historical contexts (New York, 1986), pp 318–335Google Scholar; Mageean, Deirdre, ‘Ulster emigration to Philadelphia, 1847–1865: a preliminary analysis using passenger lists’, ibid., pp 276–286Google Scholar; Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘Across the briny ocean: some thoughts on Irish emigration to America, 1800–1850’, ibid., pp 79–94Google Scholar; Glazier, Ira A., Mageean, Deirdre, Okeke, and Barbara, ‘Socio-demographic characteristics of Irish immigrants, 1846–1851’ in Klaus Friedland (ed.), Maritime aspects of migration (Cologne, 1989), pp 243–278Google Scholar; Miller, , Emigrants and exiles, p. 295Google Scholar.

⁹ Coleman, Terry, Passage to America: a history of emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland to America in the mid-nineteenth century (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Scally, Robert, ‘Liverpool ships and Irish emigrants in the age of sail’ in Journal of Social History, xvii (1983), pp 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laxton, Edward, The Famine ships: the Irish exodus to America 1846–51 (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Ferrie, Joseph P., Yankeys now: immigrants in the Antebellum United States 1840–1860 (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Globalization and history: the evolution of a nineteenth-century Atlantic economy (Boston, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohn, Raymond L., Mass migration under sail: European emigration to the Antebellum United States (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘The Famine, the New York Irish, and their bank’ in Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine, pp 182–183Google Scholar; Doyle, David Noel, ‘The remaking of Irish America, 1845–1880’ in J. J. Lee and Marion R. Casey (eds), Making the Irish American: the history and heritage of the Irish in the United States (New York, 2006), pp 219–221Google Scholar, 245 n. 21.

¹¹ Accessed via Ancestry.com. A total of sixty-nine New York ship manifests for these years provide Irish immigrants’ county of birth, and these are listed in Appendix One. Of the sixty-nine manifests, sixty-three are for ships sailing from Liverpool to New York.

¹² For the number of Irish immigrating per year to the United States, see Carter, Susan B., et al., (eds), Historical statistics of the United States (5 vols, New York, 2006), i, 560Google Scholar.

¹³ For the 74 per cent figure, see Table One.

¹⁴ On the two ships sailing from Liverpool to Philadelphia whose manifests listed the emigrants’ county of origin, slightly more than a third of the passengers originated in the six northernmost Irish counties – Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal, Down, and Tyrone. In contrast, only 13 per cent of the Irish emigrants on ships sailing from Liverpool to New York originated in these counties. For the Philadelphia emigrants, see the manifests of the Clara Wheeler, 15 July, 1850, and the George Green, 20 Aug., 1850, (‘Philadelphia passenger lists’, Ancestry.com).

¹⁵ These five major ports account for well over 99 per cent of Irish immigrants landing in the United States on trans-Atlantic vessels. In the twelve months ending on 30 September 1850, for example, 335 Irish immigrants landed at Portland, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah. Another 1,400 immigrants of all nationalities landed in those twelve months at Mobile and Galveston, but it is unlikely that more than a few hundred were Irish immigrants who had not previously landed at an East Coast port. The same holds true for the 10,000 or so non-citizens who arrived in San Francisco in that period. Many were probably Irish, but few would have sailed there directly from a non-American port. See Passengers arriving in the United States: letter from the secretary of state transmitting a statement of the number and designation of persons arriving in the United States, Thirty-First Congress, First Session, Ex. Doc. No. 7; ibid., Thirty-First Congress, Second Session, Ex. Doc. No. 16.

¹⁶ M. H. Perley to Lt. Gov. William M. G. Colebrooke, 29 Dec. 1846, Emigration. Report relative to emigration to the British provinces in North America [C 777], H.C., 1847, xxxix, 39; Perley to Provincial Secretary John S. Saunders, 28 July 1847, Emigration. Papers relative to emigration to the British provinces in North America, and to the Australian colonies. Part I. British provinces in North America, H.C. 1847–48 (50) xlvii, 89–90.

¹⁷ Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, Twelfth general report of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, 1852 [C 1499], H.C., 1852, 13–14; Keljik, Jonathan, ‘Canadians’ consternation: Irish immigration, competition, and Canada’s relationship to the United States and the British empire in the 1840s’, 49th Parallel: an interdisciplinary journal of North American Studies, xxvii (Winter 2012)Google Scholar: 9-11 (e-journal available at http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue27/Keljik.pdf). The 85% figure is based on the number of British subjects sailing to all Canadian and American ports from 1848 to 1851.

¹⁸ The figure of 916,000 Irish passengers arriving in New York from 1846 to 1854 was derived as follows: precise figures from May 1847 through the end of 1854 are available in the Annual reports of the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, from the Organization of the Commission, May 5, 1847, to 1860 (New York, 1861), p. 288. For 1846 and the first four months of 1847, see Passengers Arriving in the United States, Twenty-Ninth Congress, Second Session, House of Representatives, Doc. No. 98, pp 18–21, and Passengers arriving in the United States, Thirtieth Congress, First Session, House of Representatives, Ex. Doc. No. 47, pp 32–5. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the New York customs officials in 1846 and 1847 subsumed all Irish immigrants under the total from ‘Great Britain’, even though the collectors in Boston and Philadelphia distinguished the Irish from other British immigrants. In order to determine the number of Irish immigrants among the ‘Great Britain’ passengers arriving in New York in 1846 and early 1847, we estimated that the proportion of Irish among the British immigrants landing in New York was the same as that in Boston and Philadelphia (80 per cent in 1846 and 82 per cent in the first half of 1847).

¹⁹ The entire data set can be found in Excel format at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/anbinder, the website of the Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Information derived from this sample will be cited below as ‘Irish emigrants manifest database’.

²⁰ Smyth and Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, pp 7, 9, 34, 60, 89, 93, 108–9, 117; O’Neill, Kevin, Family and farm in pre-Famine Ireland: the parish of Killeshandra (Madison, 1984), pp 32–124Google Scholar, 167–92; Crawford, Margaret, ‘Poverty and the Famine in County Cavan’, in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), Cavan: essays on the history of an Irish county (2nd edn, Dublin, 2004), pp 139–158Google Scholar; Cusack, Danny, The Great Famine in County Meath (Navan, 1996), pp 13–20Google Scholar.

²¹ There is surprisingly little written about the Famine in Dublin, but see Corrigan, Frank, ‘Dublin workhouses during the Great Famine’ in Dublin Historical Record, xxix, no. 2 (1975–6), pp 59–65Google Scholar; Guinnane, Timothy and Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘Mortality in the North Dublin Union during the Great Famine’ in Economic History Review, lx (2002), pp 487–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Sinéad, Balrothery Poor Law Union, County Dublin, 1839–1851 (Dublin, 2005)Google Scholar; Gráda, Ó, Black ’47, pp 157–190Google Scholar.

²² Data on the Irish county of birth of 10,900 immigrants who opened accounts at the Emigrant Savings Bank come from the database listing each individual who, from 1850 to 1858, opened one of the bank’s first 18,000 accounts. This data was compiled by Tyler Anbinder in collaboration with economic historians Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone Wegge. A 5 per cent sample of this data is currently available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/anbinder and the entire data set will be placed in the same location after work on it is completed.

²³ This Ulster to Philadelphia emigration is well documented in the J. & J. Cooke, Shipping Agents collection, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Also see Mageean, ‘Ulster emigration to Philadelphia’. On the situation in Antrim and Down during the Famine, see Kinealy, Christine and Atasney, Gerard Mac, The hidden Famine: poverty and sectarianism in Belfast, 1840–1850 (London, 2000)Google Scholar; on Mayo consult Jordan, Donald, Land and popular politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (New York, 1994), pp 103–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ The data on early Irish Famine immigration needs to be used with some caution, because we know that many Irish in these years immigrated to Canada, and that many of them later moved to the United States. It is impossible, however, to determine whether the Irish who went to Canada in these years came from different parts of Ireland than those who went to New York.

²⁵ Among the 10,900 Irish immigrants who opened accounts at the Emigrant Savings Bank in New York from 1850 to 1858, 565 were natives of Cavan, 504 of Dublin, 336 of Roscommon, and 323 of Meath, while there were only 274 from Clare and 170 from Waterford. For this data see note 22. For the county-by-county emigration figures compiled beginning on 1 May 1851, see W. E. Vaughan and A. J. Fitzpatrick (eds), Irish historical statistics: population, 1821–1971 (Dublin, 1978), pp 269–343. From May 1851 to December 1854, those figures rank the origins of Irish emigrants in the following order, from most to least: Cork, Tipperary, Limerick, Kerry, Galway, Clare, Donegal, Kilkenny, Waterford, Cavan, Wexford, Mayo, Tyrone, Roscommon, Antrim, Meath, Down, Monaghan, Kings County, Queens County, Derry, Westmeath, Dublin, Armagh, Louth, Longford, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Kildare, Wicklow, Sligo, and Carlow.

²⁶ Cousens, ‘Regional pattern of emigration’, p. 121.

²⁷ That Cousens underestimated Irish emigration is not a new observation: Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘Some aspects of nineteenth-century Irish emigration’, in L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout, Comparative aspects of Scottish and Irish economic and social history, 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977), pp 70–71Google Scholar.

²⁸ Irish emigrants manifest database. Some manifests clearly differentiated between New York City and State, but most merely said ‘New York’. In those cases we used the following rules to decide whether or not New York meant the city or merely the state: 1) if the manifest listed five or more cities other than New York in the intended-destination column, then we interpreted ‘New York’ to mean New York City because the compiler of the manifest seemed intent on recording cities; 2) if a manifest listed fewer than five cities other than New York, then we did not infer that ‘New York’ referred to New York City because the manifest compiler had not exhibited much of an effort to record destinations beyond the state level; 3) if the compiler of the manifest listed a city as the destination for 45 per cent or more of the passengers not intending to settle in New York, then ‘New York’ was interpreted to mean the city of New York.

²⁹ Irish emigrants manifest database.

³⁰ Mageean, , ‘Ulster Emigration to Philadelphia’, pp 276–286Google Scholar.

³¹ Irish emigrants manifest database.

³² Irish emigrants manifest database.

³³ Irish emigrants manifest database. ‘Working-age’ was defined as sixteen or higher. For Garvin, in addition to the documents cited in note 1, see family 293, 1st division, 15th Ward, New York County, New York, 1860 manuscript census, and family 888, 14th district, 19th Ward, New York County, New York, 1870 manuscript census (National Archives, Washington, D.C., accessed via Ancestry.com).

³⁴ Ridge, John, ‘Irish county colonies in New York City (part I)’ in New York Irish History, xxv (2011), pp 58–68Google Scholar; Ridge, , ‘Irish county colonies in New York City (part II)’ in New York Irish History, xxvi (2012), pp 47–55Google Scholar; Mariano, John, The Italian contribution to American democracy (Boston, 1921), pp 19–22Google Scholar.

³⁵ This manifest is filed as the last three pages of the El Dorado on Ancestry.com.