AN ONLINE archive comprising thousands of letters sent from North America by Irish emigrants has been launched by the University of Galway.
The Imirce project includes around 7,000 letters, running to more than 150,000 documents, along with other important historical papers, with some dating back to the late 1600s.
Launched on Friday, the archive was made possible by Kerby A. Miller, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Missouri, who collected the correspondence over five decades.
Miller donated his vast research collection related to Irish emigration to North America to the University of Galway Library in 2021.
The team behind the project are now hoping its launch will lead to the submission of similar letters as they seek to expand the digital repository.
Unparalleled insight
The university has released an initial tranche of material from the Imirce project, with more letters and memoirs to be published over the rest of the year.
Among the samples released so far is part of a 1921 letter from a homesick Galway woman to her friend back in Ireland.
“Ah Nora, It makes my very heart break when I think right of home … oh Nora I hate to think of it because I do be that homesick and lonely,” it reads.
Meanwhile, an 1894 letter from Thomas McCann reveals — in the words as they written in the original author’s hand — his contentment with life in America.
“I do not care any thing at all about gone home,” it reads.
“I was born in old Ireland but I am quite happy sometimes I never think I was in old Ireland at all.
“I never (even) think of it … for I do not entend ever to see it.”
Daniel Carey, Professor of English at the University of Galway, was part of the team that developed the digital repository.
He said the collection offers an unparalleled insight into the personal reflections and lives of people as they wrote home to family and friends in Ireland.
“As an Irish American whose relations left Ireland for America during the Famine, I find this collection a profound record of the experience of emigrants, recorded in their own voices,” he said.
“The challenges of settling in a new country come to life in these letters, through reflections on ordinary events and major upheavals.
“We see how they kept their relationships going across great distances and reported home on how they were faring in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and so many cities and towns across the continent.”
‘Connection across time’
The letters and documents provide valuable insights into universal themes and individual perspectives influenced by class, religion, gender and political circumstances.
The collection is especially rich in the post-Famine period from 1850-1950.
Following the creation of the digital repository, the University of Galway Library is actively seeking contributions of other emigrant letters.
They are particularly keen to source those written in Irish in North America, and letters and memoirs produced in any language by emigrants from the Gaeltacht.
Professor Breandán Mac Suibhne, Director of Acadamh, the university’s Irish language research institution, said the project can help the descendants of emigrants connect with their forefathers.
“Letter-writing was long the primary means of communication between Irish emigrants to North America and family and friends at home,” he said.
“The Imirce database allows researchers — amateur and professional — to access an extraordinary collection of emigrant letters and memoirs assembled over half a century by historian Kerby A. Miller and it provides a repository in which people can share copies of letters in their possession.
“Imirce is at once an important resource for scholars and a potent connection, across time, between the descendants of emigrants to North America and the people and places around Ireland that their forebears left behind.”
Details about how to contribute to the collection are available at Imirce.universityofgalway.ie