A good friend of mine has arranged access to the digit­ised records of the New York Emig­rant Sav­ings Bank for 1850–1883. nyebrecord.jpgWhat a won­drous treas­ure trove of inform­a­tion! These records con­tain the deposit details for thou­sands of newly-arrived immig­rants to New York from 1850. The bank was estab­lished by the Irish Emig­rants Soci­ety and served a largely Irish pop­u­la­tion. Amaz­ingly, the Emig­rant Sav­ings Bank is still around, hold­ing about $15 bil­lion in assets.
These older records are an imme­di­ate resource for gene­a­lo­gists. In addi­tion to trans­ac­tion details, the records include a ‘test book’ which con­tains inform­a­tion on place of res­id­ence, spouse and chil­dren, occu­pa­tion, and addi­tional other nug­gets of inform­a­tion1. This inform­a­tion was com­piled when a depos­itor wished to send money back home to Ire­land. I am par­tic­u­larly fas­cin­ated by the ledgers which record depos­its and with­draw­als for a large groups of people over a sub­stan­tial period of time. There is a huge fur­ther digit­isa­tion pro­ject here to con­tinue to enter data from these records into formats allow­ing for fur­ther study.
A few years back I read Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neigh­bor­hood That Inven­ted Tap Dance, Stole Elec­tions and Became the Worlds Most Notori­ous Slum. riis.jpgGreat title eh? This one one of the most com­pel­ling micro­his­tor­ies that I have read and I was struck at the time by the ref­er­ences to indi­vidual sav­ings. In this work, Anbinder chal­lenges the appear­ances of abject poverty to note that many people in this area were liv­ing in squalour, but sav­ing rel­at­ively enorm­ous amounts of cap­ital. He pos­its that this indic­ates that they were will­ing to sac­ri­fice imme­di­ate lux­ury (or even decency) for an even­tual oppor­tun­ity to move out­side of the five points neigh­bour­hood. A fas­cin­at­ing find­ing. Five Points, is incid­ently the set­ting for Scorcese’s Gangs of New York and also for Jacob Riis’ late nine­teenth cen­tury photo doc­u­ment­ary of the urban social dis­tress, How the Other Half Lives. man_emigrant.gifNow I have a sense where Anbinder was able to get some of his inform­a­tion from. He used this inform­a­tion skil­fully to provide a fas­cin­at­ing insight on the indi­vidual pri­or­it­ies of immig­rants. I only wish that I had access to sim­ilar bank­ing records within the geo­graphy of my dis­ser­ta­tion work. Dunn and Co. records provided some fas­cin­at­ing insights on local entre­pren­eur­i­al­ism, but are dis­ap­point­ingly sparse and irreg­u­lar.
Now that access expan­ded from the micro­film rolls at the New York Pub­lic Lib­rary, new eyes and ques­tion­ing minds can appre­ci­ate this wealth of data and start to gain fresher under­stand­ing of a super­fi­cially bleak, but appar­ently hope­ful time.

  1. Check out the find­ing aid from the NYPL ref­er­enced above for more details [↩]