I've written before on this blog about how academic research
can be very beneficial to genealogists, but can sometimes not be thought of as
a potential source of relevant information or records. Therefore, I'd like to
take another opportunity to highlight a useful and interesting piece of academic
work.
Getting Their Share:
Irish and Italian Immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut, 1850-1940 is the PhD
thesis of Bruce Alan Clouette. It was submitted in 1992 at the University of
Connecticut. A recent publication considers it to be the most definitive work
on Irish immigration to Hartford, CT in the mid 19th century.[1]
Works of this magnitude can be particularly useful when they
are about just one city, as opposed to the many academic tomes which have focused
on the immigration of Irish people to the whole of the U.S. Individually named
immigrants, migration patterns from Ireland, settlement patterns in the city, Catholic
Church history and many other useful types of genealogical information can be
found in the more locally focused publications.
You can read the abstract here.
[1] Xiangming
Chen and Nick Bacon. Confronting Urban
Legacy : Rediscovering Hartford and New England's Forgotten Cities. Lanham:
Lexington Books. 2013. p. 44.
