The Captain’s Blog
The Dunbrody Famine Ship Experience is a tourist attraction in New Ross, Wexford, Ireland. As well as a replica of a famine-era Emigrant Ship, the site is also home to an extensive database of digitized passenger lists (Ships’ Manifests) dating from the 1840s to the 1880s
The ongoing work of transcribing these manifests and putting them online is what gave rise to this blog. In it, we hope to share some discoveries and insights that may be of help to family historians, genealogists and people with an interest in maritime history
As the process of emigration from Ireland became more industrialized, the ships went from sailing ships to larger and larger steamers, picking up passengers from all over Northern Europe for the passage to North America
The Price of Passage
A question often asked about the vast number of people who took the solution of leaving the country for good during and after the Irish famine is how could they possibly afford it?
The cost of a one-way steerage berth to Canada or the USA was at least three pounds. This is the equivalent of six week's wages at the pay rates of the time. Not an easy sum to put aside with mouths to feed and rent to pay. Of course, as the famine and land clearances continued, many people wanting to emigrate were landless and wageless and reduced to the hard charity of the workhouses. Some schemes were set up by the government to pay for passage to Australia and Canada and small numbers managed to get away in this manner.
But by far the most important source of funding was through money sent home by family members who had already made the crossing. This rose from 460,000 pounds in 1847 to 1.4 million in 1852, the year of peak migration. 1.4 equals 197 million by 2021 rates.
For those emigrants without the resource of remittances from abroad, a crossing on the deck of a cattle boat to Liverpool cost 10 pence and took twelve hours. This was the journey that unrecorded thousands made as a first step towards a better life.
