University of Galway's Imirce collection of emigrant letters, mostly mid-1800s

[smcarberry]

Newly online this week and searchable with the collection's own search engine are about 7,000 letters collected by a Missouri (USA) university professor who also has a teaching role at the Galway educational institution. Prof. Kerby Miller was paired with a UG techie to present his collection in two ways: a transcription of each document and, for most but not all: also original document images. Here is a quick link to the actual search engine page: https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/search

I didn't catch on the website or in the Galway newspaper's collection announcement how it was that Prof. Miller acquired the letters, other than it has been his project for several years. This became germane to my concern that only Prof. Miller's transcription is available for an 1846 letter written to Michael Gleeson by his married daughter Johanna Kelly in Upper Canada, with Gleeson described as "near Killaloe' at Newtown in Co. Tipperary. I wanted to double-check the location in the letter, but there is no word why the page image is missing. Tipperary may well be the right county. A motivated Gleeson descendant would do well to check parish baptisms in both Tipperary and Clare -- Mrs. Kelly names all her siblings in that letter.

The only collection holdings labeled as Co. Clare are "Studdert Letters" for which there are 3 years in the 1840s when Michael Studdert of Rehy Park, near Kilrush, was kept informed by a Canadian immigrant as to the Canada's economic scene, which sounds like a recession 1843-48.

Skimpy, but not a total zero, and there is an intention apparently to add to the collection in the future.