David Dobson's Irish Emigrants in North America - Consolidated Edition review

The latest consolidated edition of books from Dundee based historian David Dobson has been released by Clearfield Company through the Genealogy Publishing Company. The volume, at 835 pages in length, is entitled Irish Emigrants in North America: Consolidated Edition Parts One to Ten, and, as suggested, brings together ten volumes on the topic, as originally published between 1994 and 2020.

There were several waves of migration from Ireland to the American colonies, to the West Indies, and to Canada. These included Irish prisoners transported to the colonies by Cromwell in the 17th century, as well as those who deliberately placed themselves in the position of indentured servants, as a means to seek an easier passage to a new life. There were over 200,000 'Scotch-Irish' who migrated from the north of Ireland from the early 18th century, descendants of predominantly Lowland Scots who had migrated as colonists to Ireland in the previous century, and of course, the largely Roman Catholic 'Famine Irish', those fleeing from An Gorta Mór in the mid-19th century on board 'coffin ships' (although some Catholic Irish had already travelled to settle in places such as Maryland, long before this).  

In David's books, he has sifted through and indexed entries from a range of primary and secondary sources, such as the British Parliamentary Papers, the Irish House of Lords papers, newspapers, the national archives of Scotland (NRS), England/UK (TNA), Denmark, the USA and Canada, local archives at home, and in Canada and the USA, muster rolls, prisoner lists, university and library records, and much, much more. Each person's entry provides a brief summary of any genealogical information found, and details of their migration.

The books themselves are produced as facsimile reproductions of the original volumes, and so you will find that the layout of each varies slightly, and some archival resources will be listed under their former names, e.g. the 'Public Record Office' instead of 'The National Archives'. Helpfully though, there is a new consolidated name index for all ten volumes, as compiled by Jana Broglin, and new pagination for the 835 pages included, meaning that you only have to turn to p.765, for example, rather than a specific page number in Volume 10.

The books are, of course, not complete - there are plenty more sources out there! - but if you have not started with David's works, you have missed a very obvious starting point, and as such, this volume is yet another useful finding aid worthy of addition to the bookshelf of any Irish genealogist.   

The book is available to buy from the Genealogical Publishing Company at https://genealogical.com/store/irish-emigrants-in-north-america-consolidated-edition-parts-one-to-ten/, priced at USD $85.

(With thanks to Joe Garonzik at the GPC for a supplied review copy)

Chris

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