University of Galway has launched a digital repository of thousands of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs dating from the late 1600s through to the mid-20th century.
Featuring correspondence and other documents sent from North America, the collection offers a unique insight into the lives of people as they wrote home to family and friends in Ireland.
The Imirce project has allowed the creation of an online, publicly accessible archive of the Kerby A. Miller Collection – a unique record of personal correspondence from the Irish diaspora in the US.
The archive includes approximately 7,000 letters, running to more than 150,000 documents, along with other important historical papers.
It was collected over five decades of research by Kerby A. Miller, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Missouri and Honorary Professor of History at University of Galway, who donated the material to the University of Galway Library.
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, University of Galway Library is actively seeking contributions of other emigrant letters, in particular those written in Irish in North America, and letters and memoirs produced in any language by emigrants from the Gaeltacht.
The Imirce digital repository was developed by an interdisciplinary team, led by Professor Daniel Carey (School of English, Media and Creative Arts), Cillian Joy (University of Galway Library) and Professor Breandán Mac Suibhne (Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge), with the archival work managed by Digital Archivist Marie-Louise Rouget.
Professor Breandán Mac Suibhne, Director of the Acadamh and historian at University of Galway, said that letter-writing was long the primary means of communication between Irish emigrants to North America and family and friends at home.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
