Emigrant remittances Ireland history and prepaid passage tickets

Emigrant remittances Ireland history starts with a plain fact: between the Famine and 1900, Irish emigrants in America sent home more than $260 million in cash, bank drafts and prepaid passage tickets. It ran the opposite direction from almost every other form of help reaching Ireland in those years, because it came from the people who had already left, not from the state or the church.

The money moved through three channels: banknotes folded into ordinary letters, drafts and money orders bought from banks and passage agents, and tickets bought outright for the next family member to sail. All three are documented, though unevenly, in surviving bank ledgers, government reports and the newspapers that reported on the traffic as it grew.

Emigrant remittances Ireland history: how much crossed the Atlantic

In the mid-1830s, banks reported close to $315,000 a year moving from America to Ireland, with the real total, much of it uncounted, reckoned nearer $800,000. Once Famine-era emigration began, the sums climbed fast. Robert Murray, head of the Provincial Bank of Ireland, put the amount remitted home in 1847 at around $725,000. By 1848 the annual figure had reached roughly $2.3 million, and remittances kept rising through the 1850s to a peak of about $8.7 million in 1854. Across the decade from 1845 to 1854, the worst years of the exodus, some $19 million crossed the Atlantic toward Ireland.

The British government only began collecting official remittance statistics in 1848, three years into the Famine, so the earliest and most desperate years of the crisis survive only in individual bankers’ estimates rather than a formal count. By the second half of the century, the historian Arnold Schrier’s study of the traffic put the total sent home between the Famine and 1900 at more than $260 million, a figure still cited as the standard estimate for one of the largest private transatlantic transfers of the era.

The Emigrant Savings Bank and the machinery behind the money

Much of the traffic ran through one institution above all others. The Irish Emigrant Society, founded in New York in 1841 to meet immigrants arriving with almost nothing, established the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in 1850 with the backing of Archbishop John Hughes. 18 society members put in $200 each to open its doors at 51 Chambers Street in Manhattan. Depositors could hold their wages safely there and, through the society’s account with the Bank of Ireland, buy a bill of exchange to send home rather than trust cash to the ordinary post, a service built specifically to protect new arrivals from the counterfeit drafts that unlicensed private brokers were known to sell.

The bank grew quickly: close to 300 customers by the end of its first year, and by 1857 it ranked as the seventh-largest savings bank in New York City, holding $1.37 million in assets. Its remittance business alone was substantial. More than $600,000 passed through its books to Ireland in 1860 in a single year, and across three decades, from 1850 to 1880, the bank sent more than $30 million to Ireland, the largest share of any single institution’s contribution to the century’s total. Records of those accounts survive today in the Emigrant Savings Bank collection held by the New York Public Library, 16.2 linear feet of ledgers and society papers running from 1841 into the twentieth century.

Newspapers of the day noticed the pattern too. In March 1880, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described Irish depositors queuing at the bank to withdraw money for relatives at home, a flow it likened to a river grown wide with the years, and it warned readers away from the private drafts sold by unlicensed brokers, which sometimes came back worthless.

A second channel opened a generation later, once governments caught up with what banks and private agents had already been doing for years. A money order convention between the United States and the United Kingdom, Ireland included, was agreed in London in June 1871 and confirmed in Washington that July, then went into operation on 2 October 1871, putting the ordinary post office counter, not just a bank, into the remittance business. Demand had clearly been waiting on it: in the first four weeks alone, from 2 to 28 October 1871, the United States remitted just over $63,000 to the United Kingdom, more than four times the roughly $14,700 that moved in the other direction in the same weeks.

Prepaid passage tickets Ireland: paying for the next departure

A large share of American money never arrived as cash at all. By the second half of the century, more than 40 percent of remittances came as a prepaid passage ticket, bought from a shipping or passage agent in an American port city and posted home in an envelope in place of a draft. An emigration commissioner reporting from Ireland in 1849 told his superiors that emigration had begun feeding on itself: nearly all of the emigration recorded the previous year, by his estimate more than three quarters of it, had been paid for with money sent from America rather than raised at home.

County-level figures, where they survive, show how far the pattern had gone by mid-century. One contemporary writer claimed in 1864 that no more than 5 percent of emigrants leaving Mayo were paying their own fare, the rest travelling on tickets or money sent by relatives already in America. It is the figure most often repeated in the county’s emigration history, though it describes one observer’s impression rather than a formal count.

Historians call the pattern chain migration: one family member sails, works long enough abroad to save the fare, then sends the ticket back for the next. A single departure could, over several years, pay for four or five more, which is one reason the same decades that saw the west of Ireland held together by American money also saw it steadily emptied by it.

The American money sent home, and who sent it

The wages behind these transfers were disproportionately a woman’s. By one widely cited estimate, women accounted for around 80 percent of all remittances sent home in 1861 alone. Irish women emigrated in numbers that matched or exceeded Irish men across several decades of the century, and once in America the great majority went into domestic service. In New York City in 1855, 23,386 of the city’s 29,470 domestic servants, close to 80 percent, were Irish-born. Board and lodging came with the position, which left wages, seldom more than a few dollars a week, largely free to save and send home.

What the money rarely carried with it was any account of what it had cost to save. A servant’s remittance said, without needing to say so in words, that distance had not loosened the obligation, and it travelled, as it always had, folded inside the ordinary news of an American letter: the weather, a wedding, a name added to or missing from a list of neighbours.

What historians cannot know

The record of Irish remittances is real but uneven. Government statistics on the traffic begin only in 1848, so figures for 1846 and the worst months of 1847 rest on individual bankers’ estimates, such as Robert Murray’s, rather than an official count. Money folded directly into a letter left no trace anywhere once it arrived safely, so every bank and post office total almost certainly understates the true sum sent home in cash. The 40 percent figure for prepaid tickets describes the second half of the century as a whole, not any single year, and a county-level claim such as the 5 percent figure for Mayo in 1864 is one observer’s impression, repeated in local history, rather than a verified census. Even a large surviving archive like the Emigrant Savings Bank’s records is a sample of what one institution kept and what later survived fire, flood and time, not a full account of everything Irish America sent home.

A pattern that outlasted the century

The habit did not end with the Victorian era. Money kept crossing from America, and later from Britain, to Ireland well into the twentieth century: by 1961 alone, Irish emigrants in Britain sent home an estimated £13.5 million in a single year, and across the postwar decades sometimes called the mailboat generation, the cumulative total has been reckoned in the billions in today’s money. The mechanism changed, from bills of exchange to postal orders to bank transfers, but the underlying transaction, wages earned abroad turned into help for a household still at home, ran on the logic Irish emigrants had already established by the 1850s.

The opening exchange of our own correspondence between Ireland and America is free to read in full, for anyone who wants to see what one such exchange actually looked like on paper.

Sources and further reading

• Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900 (1958), for the estimate of more than $260 million sent home between the Famine and 1900 and the account of prepaid passage tickets and chain migration.
• New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, “Emigrant Savings Bank records, 1841-1945” (finding aid), for the founding, growth, assets and remittance business of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank.
• Mayo County Council Library Service, “Crossing the Atlantic” (local history collection), for the 1845 to 1854 remittance total, the 1864 estimate of self-paid passage from Mayo, and the later mailboat-generation figures.
• The Irish Story, “The Irish Girl and the American Letter: Irish immigrants in 19th century America” (2018), for the decade-by-decade remittance figures from the 1830s to 1854 and the estimate of women’s share of remittances in 1861.
• The Irish Story, “Invisible Income: Remittances from the Diaspora sustained Ireland for over a century” (2019), for the founding of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank and its 1860 remittance total.
• Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Irish Remittances to Friends in Ireland”, 13 March 1880, for the contemporary press account of the bank’s remittance traffic and the fraudulent drafts sold by private brokers.
• Office of the Historian, US Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1871, for the 2 October 1871 commencement date of the US-UK postal money order convention and its first-month remittance figures.