Erin's Sons

Book excerpt: From the time of the earliest European colonies, there were Irish settlers in the four provinces of Atlantic Canada--Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Despite the flow of Irish through Atlantic Canada, the early records of these immigrants are fewer and less informative than those of New England and New York from the same period. "Erin's Sons: Irish Arrivals in Atlantic Canada 1761-1853" goes a long way toward rectifying this problem. Author Terrence M. Punch has combed through a wide-ranging and disparate group of sources-including newspaper articles and advertisements, local government documents and census records, church records, burial records, land records, military records, passenger lists, and more-to identify as many of these pioneers as possible and disclose where they came from in the Old Country. These sources often contain details that cannot be found in Irish records, where few census returns survived from before 1901, and where Catholic records began a generation or more after their counterparts in Atlantic Canada.