A scholar uses bank records to track the surge of Murphys and Sullivans and Kellys who emigrated to New York after the ~1850 Irish potato Famine, and learns that about 40% who started out as day laborers ended as business owners and professionals, and many who lived in the poor Irish neighborhoods had enough money to live elsewhere had they wanted to.
I knew that the Irish had saved more than I expected. But I didn’t know that there was socioeconomic mobility tied to that. My goal was just to use the fact that you could trace these people’s lives like never before to try to tell the story of the famine immigrants with a level of detail that had never been done before. I made myself a little Excel spreadsheet and I put people in it. Each person got a line.
As I went from having 10 lives to 100 lives to 1,000 lives, I came up with codes (for different types of jobs) and tallied it up. What I found in the end was 41% of the people who started out as day laborers and other unskilled positions end up at the end of their lives as business owners or other white-collar jobs.
Nobody — even the experts in Irish American history — nobody imagined that four in 10 day laborers could end up in white-collar jobs. This is just inconceivable to anyone who had ever thought about the famine Irish given the obstacles that faced them.
d.
