This book works to disprove the long accepted idea that the Irish who came to America fleeing the Potato Famine arrived as unskilled labor, and remained at the lowest rungs of society for the rest of their lives. Anbinder, with help from a number of assistants, undertook a ten year study, and this book is the result of that work. While he focuses on the Irish who arrived and lived in New York City long enough to open an account at the Emigrant Savings Bank, much of what he found could undoubtedly be applied to the Irish who arrived through other ports and used other banks. The reason for the focus of this study is that the records of the Emigrant Savings Bank have recently been digitized, and when people opened accounts there, the bank asked for more information than you might normally provide, including place of birth, the name of the ship they arrived on, and information about their parents and siblings. Genealogical gold!
This is a book that describes the lives of a huge number of average people, with the goal of determining if they moved up the social or economic ladder. Anbinder supplemented the information from the Emigrant Savings Bank records with census and newspaper data. While he mainly studied the people whose data was available for about 10 years after arrival, he still had a wealth of information to study. He includes several charts, which show what occupational level individuals started at, and where they ended up. While there were no hard and fast rules, many were able to improve their occupational level. Even though many started as unskilled labor, quite a few were able to move up to skilled labor, or even clerical jobs. If they had been at one of those levels when they left Ireland, they might have been able to climb to the level of business owner or professional.
If you have Irish ancestors that arrived in New York City in the 1840’s or 1850’s, you should read this book. Even if you have no Irish ancestry whatsoever, this is an amazing study of a specific group in a specific place and time span. While the focus is on the immigrants who stayed in NYC, Anbinder also has some information about the people who moved west, taking advantage of the relatively inexpensive land costs, and on some of the descendants of the immigrants. As might be expected, most of the second generation did at least as well, and many did better than, their parents. There are always exceptions, and there are a few ne’er-do-wells who are mentioned.
If this was your family, how would you research them? As I noted above, much of Anbidner’s information came from the censuses, city directories, and newspapers, specifically the New York City newspapers. In addition to the usual newspaper websites (Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank), he utilized Old Fulton Postcards, https://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html, which he says has some New York issues that are hard to find. As for the information that is the foundation for this book, the records of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York, that information is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/anbinder. The information appears to be available in Excel spreadsheet form, and may be difficult to use.