Irish emigration
We are approaching the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg, the engagement more closely associated with the Irish experience of the Civil War than any in the conflict. There will undoubtedly be much focus on the efforts of the Irish Brigade...
I was delighted to be interviewed recently by the Civil War Times magazine regarding my work on the Irish in the American Civil War. The piece was published in their most recent issue, and has now been made freely available online on...
The last post represented the 500th on Irish in the American Civil War. I estimate that the site in its totality is now composed of c. 1,000,000 words. I established the site in May 2010, over seven years ago, little imagining where it would...
The site regularly returns to the topic of letters written to inform families of the death of a loved one (see Communicating Death & Creating Memory on Fredericksburg’s Streets). As we have seen, these communications occasionally didn’t hold back in...
On 2nd June 1864 Hubert McNamara of the 155th New York Infantry, Corcoran’s Irish Legion, prepared a letter for his wife. He was aware that the following morning he would be going into action; he was among the men of...
I am pleased to bring to readers the third and final instalment of Catherine Bateson’s guest posts charting the correspondence of Cork’s Daniel Crowley, who served in the 28th Massachusetts Infantry, Irish Brigade in 1864-5. If you have missed the...
As many readers of the site will be aware, the majority of my work concentrates on material from the widows’ and dependent pension files of Irish Civil War soldiers held in the National Archives, Washington D.C. This was also the...
The widows and dependent pension files often give us an extraordinary insight into 19th century emigration. Occasionally these are from the perspectives of those who remained in Ireland. I recently came across just such a letter, written in late 1863 by...
On 18th August last I was privileged to return to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin to deliver one of the Summer lunchtime talks at the institution, which are organised by Eneclann and the Ancestor Network. The title of...
As many of you know, I have spent the majority of my writing time since the 2013 publication of The Irish in the American Civil War concentrating on one major source for the Irish experience of 19th century America, namely the widows...