The Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago is a center in the Mayfair district of the city of Chicago that is dedicated to preserving and promoting the heritage of the huge Irish American community in both Chicago and the wider United States. Irish Americans constitute one of the largest ethnic groups within the US, with millions of Irish people having arrived to the country and settled there, during the nineteenth century in particular due to the impact of the Irish Potato Famine. They congregated in huge numbers in several specific cities, New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia being the most prominent. Over time the Irish American community would play a great role in American life, with several presidents and senior political figures being of Irish descent. The Heritage Center in Chicago seeks to preserve and promote Irish American culture in the US. It is also a fantastic resource for genealogical studies and for anyone seeking to develop a greater understanding of their family’s Irish background and heritage.[1]
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History of the Irish American communityHistory of the Irish American community
The Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago is a direct byproduct of the emergence of the Irish American community in the United States between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The Irish American diaspora is one of the oldest in the Americas. Irish people began arriving to the Virginia colony around Jamestown and other settlements there in the early seventeenth century, often as indentured servants. They continued to migrate in considerable numbers to the Thirteen Colonies in the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the Scots-Irish community also became a considerable factor in the colonization of places like Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Georgia from the 1730s onwards.[2]
The real explosion in Irish settlement in the United States came from the 1830s onwards. Ireland was already quite overpopulated by the early nineteenth century, given its relative poverty and inability to support a population that exceeded eight million at its peak. Then the arrival of the potato blight to Ireland in the mid-1840s on the first steamships from the Americas resulted in the Great Famine in Ireland. This peaked between 1847 and 1850. As it did, it opened the floodgates to Irish immigration to the United States. Over 200,000 people arrived in the 1830s; 780,000 in the 1840s; over 900,000 in the 1850s; 435,000 in both the 1860s and 1870s; and another million people between 1880 and 1900. Thereafter the figure began to decline considerably, with 400,000 in the 1900s, then 145,000 in the 1910s. By the middle of the twentieth century an average of just 4,000 Irish people were arriving to the US per year.[3]
This influx of approximately four million Irish people between 1830 and 1910 created the basis for a huge Irish American community in the United States. Over 10%, or some 36 million Americans, are believed to have substantial Irish ancestry. Moreover, many of these are particularly densely concentrated in specific parts of the United States. Over 20% of the population of the city of Boston in Massachusetts is of Irish heritage, while cities like Philadelphia, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Portland, Buffalo, Seattle and Nashville tend to have populations where at least one in ten people identify as Irish American. The figure is 8% in Chicago, although it used to be much higher before the Great Migration and other events in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries diluted the Irish American proportion of the population.[4]
The Irish American Heritage Center in ChicagoThe Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago
The Irish American Heritage Center was established in Chicago in 1976 in recognition of the role of the Irish American community in developing Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Its goal is to celebrate Irish culture and heritage within the United States and it holds a wide-ranging program of events every year, from musical events and poetry recitations to gatherings of Irish Americans and visiting lectures, often by individuals from Ireland itself. For instance, the current Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, has visited the Center. In 1985, the Heritage Center opened its main headquarters on Knox Avenue in the Mayfair district of Chicago. The Center boasts many different facilities, including an Irish pub and museum, a library, lecture halls, a gallery and rooms for gatherings and events, as well as the Mayfair Theatre.[5]
Genealogical studies at the Irish American Heritage CenterGenealogical studies at the Irish American Heritage Center
The Irish American Heritage Center is a valuable resource for studying one’s family history and heritage in America. Genealogy tools and data sets are available through it, both online and in the Center’s physical library in Chicago. For instance, key sources for tracing a person’s ancestors back to Ireland in the nineteenth century are available, notably Griffith’s Valuation, Irish civil registration and church records, and UK and Ireland censuses where available.[6] These can then be compared with US-based records, some of which are records of entry into the United States, often at Castle Garden and Ellis Island in New York, as well as municipal records more specific to Chicago itself. Tens of millions of records pertaining to Castle Garden and Ellis Island are available through MyHeritage.[7]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Irish American Heritage Center in ChicagoExplore more about the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago
- Passengers arriving in New York from Ireland, 1846-1851 records collection on MyHeritage
- Transatlantic Migration, North America to Britain and Ireland, 1858-1870 records collection on MyHeritage
- British & Irish Passenger Lists 1890 records collection on MyHeritage
- New York Castle Garden Immigrants records collection on MyHeritage
- Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 records collection on MyHeritage
- Tracing your immigrant ancestor to Ireland at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- My ancestors were Irish – or were they? at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://irish-american.org/
- ↑ Timothy J. Meagher, ‘Irish Immigration in the Colonial Era, 1585–1775’, in Timothy J. Meagher, Becoming Irish American: The making and remaking of a people, from Roanoke to JFK (Yale, 2023), chapter 2.
- ↑ Patrick J. Blessing, ‘Irish’, in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), p. 528.
- ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/?sh=457bb20a628c
- ↑ https://irish-american.org/
- ↑ https://irish-american.org/product-category/genealogy/
- ↑ https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/castle-garden-where-immigrants-first-came-to-america