An "overview for anyone wishing to trace [his or her] Irish ancestors within the five boroughs of New York City. It is especially beneficial for those researching ancestors from the beginning of the 19th century to the early 20th"--P. 11.

Finding Your Irish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide is the ultimate resource to help you learn if the luck of the Irish is in your blood or not. This easy-to-use guide will teach you to make use of the many Irish family history records that have become available in recent years. Explore the best family history sources in Ireland, including birth, marriage, and death records; church records; census records; and much more. Finding Your Irish Ancestors will help you discover Internet sites for searching Irish heritge and prepare for a successful family history trip to Ireland.

Discover your roots! Everything you need to start your Irish ancestry is in this book. You'll learn how to investigate the various generation of your family, the events that shaped their lives, the details about how they lived, and the story of their emigration.Inside you'll find: • Guidelines for determining an Irish ancestor's place of origin • Advice for accessing Irish cemetery, land, church, estate, census, and military records • Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths as well as emigration lists • Sources and strategies for researching Irish ancestors that settled in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Wales, and the Caribbean Plus answers to common questions: How far back in time can you expect to trace your family; and how does Protestant Irish research differ from Catholic Irish research?

His new book, Finding Your Irish Ancestors, is intended as a companion volume to the venerable Pocket Guide. Making use of the case study technique employed in the Pocket Guide, this new book expounds on topics that are not found in his earlier book and expands on others that are. For example, Irish surnames and place names represent a treasure trove of historical information and contain genealogical clues that are frequently overlooked by researchers. Accordingly, Finding Your Irish Ancestors includes two chapters on the importance of surnames and the importance of place names in family history. The place name chapter, for instance, explains the etymological origins of a number of Irish townlands and the importance in Irish research of the all-important finding aid the General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, Parishes and Baronies of Ireland. Another neglected topic is the role of local history in Irish genealogy. In the final chapter of his new book, Mitchell uses the case study method to illustrate how delving into published town histories and unpublished local manuscript collections can unearth buried evidence on Irish ancestors. Although a list of government-supported Genealogy Centres in Ireland can be found in the Pocket Guide, Mitchell now shows the reader, in some detail, how best to use these important resources. And he ought to know, inasmuch as he has administered the Derry Genealogy Centre for more than a decade. The chapter pertaining to emigration and Irish passenger lists includes a brief history of 19th-century Irish emigration, while another one focuses on how to make the best use of church registers--perhaps the single most important source in Irish genealogy. Drawing on his first-hand experience as a genealogist and as a geographer, Brian Mitchell delivers a new volume that is full of first-hand explanations and expertly drawn maps of Ireland and Northern Ireland. If you own a copy of the Pocket Guide, you are sure to want Brian Mitchell's latest collection of Irish genealogy essays, Finding Your Irish Ancestors.

The companion how-to guide to the hit TV series-with advice for anyone starting their own genealogical search. In the groundbreaking NBC series Who Do You Think You Are? seven celebrities-Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmitt Smith, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, and Spike Lee-went on an emotional journey to trace their family history and discover who they really are, and millions of viewers caught the genealogy bug. With the official companion guide, anyone can learn how to chart their family's unique path. Featuring step-by-step instructions from Megan Smolenyak2, one of America's top genealogical researchers, this book offers everything readers need to know to start the journey into their past, from digging through old photos, to finding the best online resources.

Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995 Linda Dowling Almeida The story of one of the most visible groups of immigrants in the major city of immigrants in the last half of the 20th century. "Almeida offers a dynamic portrait of Irish New York, one that keeps reinventing itself under new circumstances." —Hasia Diner, New York University "[Almeida's] close attention to changes in economics, culture, and politics on both sides of the Atlantic makes [this book] one of the more accomplished applications of the 'new social history' to a contemporary American ethnic group." —Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati It is estimated that one in three New York City residents is an immigrant. No other American city has a population composed of so many different nationalities. Of these "foreign born," a relatively small percentage come directly from Ireland, but the Irish presence in the city—and America—is ubiquitous. In the 1990 census, Irish ancestry was claimed by over half a million New Yorkers and by 44 million nationwide. The Irish presence in popular American culture has also been highly visible. Yet for all the attention given to Irish Americans, surprisingly little has been said about post–World War II immigrants. Almeida's research takes important steps toward understanding modern Irish immigration. Comparing 1950s Irish immigrants with the "New Irish" of the 1980s, Almeida provides insights into the evolution of the Irish American identity and addresses the role of the United States and Ireland in shaping it. She finds, among other things, that social and economic progress in Ireland has heightened expectations for Irish immigrants. But at the same time they face greater challenges in gaining legal residence, a situation that has led the New Irish to reject many organizations that long supported previous generations of Irish immigrants in favor of new ones better-suited to their needs. Linda Dowling Almeida, Adjunct Professor of History at New York University, has published articles on the "New Irish" in America and is a longtime member of the New York Irish History Roundtable. She also edited Volume 8 of the journal New York Irish History. March 2001 232 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append. cloth 0-253-33843-3 $35.00 s / £26.5

As one of the country's oldest ethnic groups, the Irish have played a vital part in its history. New York has been both port of entry and home to the Irish for three centuries. This joint project of the Irish Institute and the New York Irish History Roundtable offers a fresh perspective on an immigrant people's encounter with the famed metropolis. 37 illustrations.

As they entered their 600th year of British occupation, the Irish looked to America. By the 1840s, America was the oasis that the Irish sought during a decade of both famine and revolution, and New York City was the main destination. The city would never be the same. Refugees of the famine found leadership in Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes, who built an Irish-Catholic infrastructure of churches, schools, hospitals, and orphanages that challenged the Protestant power structure of the city. Revolutionaries found a home in NYC, too: Thomas Francis Meagher would later become Lincoln’s favorite Irish war general; John Devoy and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa continued their fight from the city after the failed Rising of 1867; two men killed in the Easter Rising, Tom Clarke and James Connolly, spent substantial time in New York. From there, the Irish rose and helped shape New York politics, labor, social activism, entertainment, and art. W. R. Grace was New York’s first Irish-Catholic mayor, followed by Tammany rogue James J. Walker, and then William O’Dwyer of County Mayo. On the labor side, Michael J. Quill, ex-IRA, of the Transport Workers of America, found his perfect foil in WASP mayor John V. Lindsay. Dorothy Day and Margaret Sanger became famed social activists. While the Irish made up much of the NYPD and FDNY, there was also the criminal element of the 1860s. The toughness of the New York underworld caught the eye of Hollywood, and James Cagney would become one of America’s favorite tough-guy movie characters. Irish gangs would be made famous in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Today, Eugene O’Neill, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Frank McCourt populate our literary canon. These Irish influenced every phase of American society, and their colorful stories make up Real Irish New York.

Few writers on the Irish in America have looked beyond the nineteenth-century ethnic enclaves of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago, or have asked how the notion of an Irish-American ethnic identity in contemporary America can be reconciled with five, six, or seven generations of intermarriage and assimilation over the last century and a half. This study, based on interviews with 500 people of Irish ancestry in Albany, New York, aims to discover in what senses and in what degrees the present-day descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants possess distinctive social practices and ways of seeing the world, and raises questions about the social conditions in which ideas of Irishness have been created and re-created.