Atlantic Canada S Irish Immigrants

A transformative work that explodes assumptions about the importance of the Great Irish Potato Famine to Irish immigration. In this major study, Lucille Campey traces the relocation of around ninety thousand Irish people to their new homes in Atlantic Canada. She shatters the widespread misconception that the exodus was primarily driven by dire events in Ireland. The Irish immigration saga is not solely about what happened during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s; it began a century earlier. Although they faced great privations and had to overcome many obstacles, the Irish actively sought the better life that Atlantic Canada offered. Far from being helpless exiles lacking in ambition who went lemming-like to wherever they were told to go, the Irish grabbed their opportunities and prospered in their new home. Campey gives these settlers a voice. Using wide-ranging documentary sources, she provides new insights about why the Irish left and considers why they chose their various locations in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. She highlights how, through their skills and energy, they benefitted themselves and contributed much to the development of Atlantic Canada. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of the Irish exodus to North America and provides a mine of information useful to family historians.

Atlantic Canada covers the following provinces: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.

Volume III of Erin's Sons extends the period of coverage to 1858 and lists approximately 7,000 additional Irish-born residents of Atlantic Canada. Like the other volumes in the series, it is based on a wide variety of genealogical sources, including church records, cemetery inscriptions, marriage and burial records, newspapers, census records, and ships' passenger lists.

From the time of the earliest European colonies, there were Irish settlers in the four provinces of Atlantic Canada--Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Despite the flow of Irish through Atlantic Canada, the early records of these immigrants are fewer and less informative than those of New England and New York from the same period. "Erin's Sons: Irish Arrivals in Atlantic Canada 1761-1853" goes a long way toward rectifying this problem. Author Terrence M. Punch has combed through a wide-ranging and disparate group of sources-including newspaper articles and advertisements, local government documents and census records, church records, burial records, land records, military records, passenger lists, and more-to identify as many of these pioneers as possible and disclose where they came from in the Old Country. These sources often contain details that cannot be found in Irish records, where few census returns survived from before 1901, and where Catholic records began a generation or more after their counterparts in Atlantic Canada.

Volume II of "Erin's Sons" covers the same time period as its predecessor and the same geographic area--the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia--and it lists an additional 7,000 Irish arrivals in Atlantic Canada before 1853. What is remarkable about this second volume is the rich variety of information derived from hard-to-find sources such as church records of marriages and burials, cemetery records, headstone inscriptions, military description books, newspapers, poor house records, and passenger lists.

"A vivid and detailed account of the Irish immigrants who settled in early Canada.Canada's Irish Pioneers is Lucille Campey's third book on Irish immigration to Canada. It incorporates material from her two previous books relating to Atlantic Canada and Ontario and Quebec and describes their settlements in the Prairies and British Columbia. New insights are also provided on the financial assistance provided by landlords to their tenants during the famine years and by the custodians of workhouses later on. Canada's Irish Pioneers is the first, fully-documented account, produced in recent times, of the great migration of Irish people to Canada. It is packed full of data on sea crossings and settlements, and the phenomenal geographical progress which the Irish made across Canada can be viewed in twenty six maps.The Irish were ambitious people with big dreams who were desperate to escape from the poverty in their homeland. This saga is all about the thrusting, brave and well-organized immigrants who prospered in Canada.Extensively documented, the book contains much of vital interest to genealogists and historians.Lucille Campey, born in Ottawa, is the author of fourteen books on early Scottish, English and Irish immigration to Canada. A professional researcher and historian, she has a master's degree in medieval history from Leeds University and a Ph.D. from Aberdeen University in emigration history. She lives near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England.In his recent "Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections" blog, John Reid outlined the extensive coverage of the book and its value to family historians" -- publisher.

Taking on the myth that Irish settlers in Canada were a wave of famine victims, Lucille Campey reveals the pioneering achievements of the Irish who began populating — and thriving in — Ontario and Quebec a century before the famine of 1840. The second volume of the Irish in Canada series brings an informative and lively account of this great saga.