February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The stonemason had left the Boston area find work, but now his wife and four children had arrived in town and were “extremely anxious to hear from him.”
The next month there was another notice looking for yet another Irish immigrant. The next year there were over a dozen. Soon the Pilot became the definitive way to search for emigrated Irish siblings, spouses and friends.
The Pilot proved to be a valuable resource for Ruth-Ann Harris, an adjunct professor of history and Irish Studies at Boston College who has done more than 20 years of research on the distribution patterns of Irish immigrants.
Boston College’s Irish studies program unveiled the fruits of her labor last week with “Information Wanted,” a Web site that collected more than 31,000 of these advertisements and has put the information into a searchable database.
These advertisements were the impetus behind Harris’s project, having ran from 1831 until 1921, when the paper was purchased by the Archdiocese of Boston, which still prints it today. It was then that the wave of Irish immigration slowed and international postal service improved, making it easier to find people using those methods.
Harris did much of the original legwork herself until Boston College took the formula she had developed for the New England Historical Genealogical Society and created the searchable Web site.
Using a name, town, date of arrival in the U.S., among other details, one can find records pertaining to some of the earliest Irish immigrants. The ads, which cost around $3, were expensive at a time when many people made little more a week. Harris said that in many cases, a group of people or extended family would chip in for one notice.
As Harris points out, there were no thorough immigration records kept before the 1860s, so the Pilot gave an idea of how the Irish spread throughout America.
“We mostly think of the Irish on the East Coast, but they are all over,” she said. “They were especially well distributed along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, even as far up as Minnesota.”
Harris, who is from Canada but has roots in County Waterford, said she believes the project needed to happen because “people are looking to discover their Irish roots more often.”
The Pilot
The Pilot was one of the most influential publications for the Irish in America, having been started in Boston by a Jesuit priest named Benedict Fenwick in 1829.
At the time, newly arrived Catholics from Ireland and France were clashing with more established Protestants, and Fenwick said the paper should serve as a voice to call for the “explanation and defense of the Catholic faith.”
In 1838, Cavan native Patrick Donahue took the reins of the newspaper, and under his leadership, the paper began publishing news of mainly Irish politics and happenings.
“The Pilot was a fantastic publication,” Harris said. “It must have put a lot of heart in immigrants to read about home and jobs available, as well as the missing persons column.”
Harris explains that the Pilot used the “Information Wanted” notices as a marketing tool once they saw the overwhelming response.
“Their distribution network grew, and I’m quite certain it was because of these ads,” she said.
No one knows if Patrick McDermott was reunited with his family, but plenty of others searching found theirs. In the late 1800s, the Pilot boasted a 75 percent success rate, though Harris is not certain of that figure.
The short notices told volumes in some cases. One 1842 advertisement Harris came across was from a husband searching for his wife, whom he had followed from Ireland to Iowa. Upon arriving in Dubuque, he found out that she had most likely traveled down the Mississippi to the South.
“I wondered why he would have gone to all this trouble,” she said, “and I realized he was probably trying to get her to sign off on her dowry, which was still done at the time.
Harris hopes the database can be used in addition to the many other Irish genealogy and historical resources available.
“Ireland kept such good records,” she noted. “Because of my work, people were always asking me for searches.”
Of Boston College, she said, “They are a godsend. My formula wasn’t easy, as it was all based in statistics. This database makes it accessible.”
As a historian, Harris noted that she used many social sciences, such as sociology anthropology in the course of her work.
Her interest in immigration patterns came from the time she spent with her husband in Africa
“It’s seeing what happens when people migrate,” she said. “I was always collecting people’s stories and people love to tell you their stories. It’s funny how similar factors are still in place today.”
Old patterns die hard
Harris said that the greatest value for her was that many of the notices mentioned the town and parish the missing people came from, which proved to be an invaluable resource.
Harris used County Cork as a starting point for much of her research.
“Cork is well represented in the ads,” she said. “It proved to be an interesting microcosm.”
Harris found that of the Cork towns with the most immigration, there were two significant similarities: that they were along communication lines, and that the education level of women was generally higher than elsewhere.
“They could have been encouraging their children to immigrate or they would themselves,” she said.
Evidence from the ads suggest that the Irish were more widely dispersed across the U.S. than previously thought.
“Some went out as far as the gold rush in the West, and just disappeared,” Harris said.
Harris said she was surprised to find that the majority of the ads were people looking for brothers and sisters. Sixty-five percent of the notices were people looking for their siblings, which is a bond that many immigrant still use today when arriving in the U.S.
“There are heavy bonds of duty to provide for the family among the Irish,” Harris said. “That is why the family network is so terribly important.”
She added that 6 percent were looking for husbands, and about 5 percent were mothers looking for their sons who had gone off to find work, usually building jobs in developing areas.
Genealogy, specifically among those of Irish descent, is a growing industry. With 44 million people in the U.S. alone who claim Irish roots, it is not uncommon today to find notices, though usually on Internet sites, searching for old relatives or information about them.