Tuesday 22 October 2019

Dobson's 'Irish Emigrants to North America' is next Ancestry World Archives Project

Ancestry World Archives Projects (WAP) team has announced a new transcription project that'll be of interest to Irish family historians.

The chosen resource is David Dobson's 160-page book Emigrants from Ireland to North America, Parts one, two and three, which concentrates on immigrants arriving in Canada in the late C18th and early C19th. The author's Introduction explains that most of those listed in this book were former soldiers who had been encouraged to settle in Canada after the Napoleonic Wars by the British Government. As such you may be able to find more records about these individuals in mainstream military collections.

Parts four and five and Part six are already searchable as browse collections on Ancestry.

In the majority of entries in the listing, only one individual is noted, but in some, information of an entire family may be recorded. Some entries provide place of origin or other details of the emigrant (see sample below).

By Ancestry's standards, this is a small WAP, so we shouldn't have to wait too long for the indexed collection to become available for searching. If you want to help speed it along, see the WAP announcement here.