Kerby Miller compiles Irish emigrant letters spanning 1818 to 1972

Irish emigrant letters spanning from 1818 to 1972, compiled by historian Kerby Miller, reveal the diverse, heartbreaking, and fiercely independent realities of life in North America. These personal correspondences, preserved in the collection titled A Letter Home, capture how generations of Irish immigrants understood their displacement, navigated grueling economic hardships, and judged their new surroundings from locations stretching from Ohio plantations to New York tenements.

Documenting the Irish Exodus Through Personal Letters

Kerby Miller, author of the 1985 landmark study Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, spent decades gathering roughly 5,000 letters after starting his research as a graduate student at Berkeley in the early 1970s. Finding material in archives and libraries, Miller also appealed directly to newspapers across Ireland. He promised to copy and return original documents to families who treated the letters as treasured heirlooms, leading to an expansive archive now housed at the University of Galway.

Each entry in the collection is prefaced by Miller’s historical introductions, which shed light on the structural forces driving the exodus. The correspondence ranges from an 1819 letter penned in Ohio by Neal Campbell of Coalisland complaining of the boldness of American women, to an 1856 account by Armagh native Bill Williamson detailing a wagon train journey from Chicago to California. Margaret McCarthy wrote to Cork in 1850 expressing relief at escaping a famine-stricken homeland while sending money to bring her siblings to New York.

Gossip, Respectability, and Hardship in North America

Many letters offer intimate, sometimes sharp glimpses into daily immigrant life, including an 1882 dispatch from Hartford, Connecticut. Writing to her uncle in New Ross, County Wexford, 24-year-old emigrant Maggie Hennessy recounted local neighborhood drama involving the Doyles. Two years prior, Hennessy had worked as a live-in domestic servant for wealthy lithographer William Dodd and his wife, Mary.

Historians note that such gleeful reporting of domestic and neighborhood conflicts served as an assertion of respectability. Although Hennessy was an emigrant working in service, her letters positioned her as morally and socially elevated above bickering neighbors who landed in police custody. Yet beneath the gossip lay deep trauma. Whether writing from shacks, tenements, or fine servants’ quarters, immigrants frequently expressed a profound ambivalence, cursing what they termed the land that made them refugees while simultaneously advising friends on whether to make the journey.

British Policies and the Political Roots of Emigration

The Political Realities Behind the Exodus

The collection also documents how political awareness shaped the migration. In an 1818 letter to William Bennett—a family friend who fled to the United States following the defeat of the United Irishmen in 1798—emigrant schoolmaster Daniel Polin of County Down detailed the devastation of Ireland’s economy. Polin wrote that local resources for earning money were completely extinct and that farming had deteriorated sharply, noting that relief could only come through revolution.

Polin observed that British authorities deliberately fostered divisions among the population to prevent collective resistance. The government had connived at a disunion of the people, he wrote, successfully preventing Irish citizens from viewing their grievances through a single focus. Through these letters, Miller’s collection preserves not only the personal griefs and small triumphs of individuals, but the broader economic and political pressures that forced generations to leave Ireland.