A good friend of mine has arranged access to the digit­ised records of the New York Emig­rant Sav­ings Bank for 1850–1883. What 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. Read the rest of this entry »

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