IMIRCE -The Kerby Miller Collection

Photo by Mrika Selimi on Unsplash

While technically not another data base for researching your Irish roots, IMIRCE – the University of Galway host the Kerby A. Miller Collection (Irish Immigrant letters and memoirs). If you have an Irish Immigrant, you will want to check out this growing collection. Let’s look.

Imagine how wonderful it would be to have a letter in your ancestor’s handwriting! This collection  includes letters from the seventeenth to twentieth century of immigrants from North America. According to the site,” IMIRCE is a two-part project. The first part involves making the Kerby A. Miller Collection available in an online database beginning on 7 March 2024 and finishing before the end of that calendar year. The second part involves collecting and transcribing additional emigrant letters and memoirs composed in North America and adding them to the database. The Imirce team is particularly eager to source material in Irish and material, in Irish or English, written by people from Irish-speaking districts.”
 
To view the information, go here. Search | IMIRCE | University of Galway  You can search for a location or a person. For example, I’m interested in County Donegal so I searched there and found a number of letters from someone in Ontario to family back home in Donegal. It’s a great way to see what people thought about or kept in their letters. You can choose to filter by century, decade, place, gender, topic and more. The exciting thing about this collection is that it will continue to grow.
 
To see where the letters were sent from and received using maps, check out this page:
Explore | IMIRCE | University of Galway  You can visually see locations and delve in to see more details. For example, I clicked on a circle in County Donegal. Once I did that, I was able to choose to view the letters related to that location. https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/search?q=Ballyshannon,%20Donegal%20(county),%20Ireland
Another search using the filter method and choosing “Canada” resulted in this interesting collection of letters which Daniel Shehan talked about the voyage from Ireland to Canada in 1841! This particular collection shows the original letters/handwriting so some patience might be needed to read. What an interesting way to gain insight into how it felt to travel and immigrate at this time. Take a look: https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/search?q=Shehan%20Letters
 
If you can’t find letters for your region, take heart that they are continuing to add to this collection. If you have some treasured letters from your Irish immigrants, you can upload them to be included in this collection. https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/contribute
 
I love these specialized databases and hope that you will enjoy exploring this too. Perhaps it will inspire you to do some of your own letter writing! Happy exploring!