How a famine family raised the passage money

A family in 1847 raising the fare for a transatlantic ticket sold whatever stock and household goods they had, timed the sale around the twice-yearly gale day when rent fell due, cashed in tenant right where the Ulster custom applied, borrowed against a future they could not yet see, or accepted help from a landlord clearing a farm or a Poor Law union emptying a workhouse bed. There was no single method. There was only whatever could be found.

How Irish families raised passage money without help from abroad

The question matters most for the earliest famine sailings, because the answer changed within a few years. By the early 1850s, a large share of Irish emigrants were travelling on tickets bought and sent home by relatives already settled in Boston or New York. In 1847, that network barely existed. A family with a son or daughter set on Quebec or Boston that autumn had almost nobody abroad yet able to send money home, so the fare had to be raised entirely at home, from what the household owned, from who they knew locally, or from whoever stood to gain by seeing them go. Selling stock, timing a departure to gale day, drawing on tenant right, and accepting landlord or Poor Law assistance were the main routes open to a family with no emigrant relation yet established on the far side of the Atlantic.

Selling stock, before anything else

For a smallholding family, livestock was the asset that converted fastest to cash. A cow, a few sheep, or a clutch of pigs sold at the local fair could raise several pounds in a single transaction, and unlike land or a lease, stock could be sold without a landlord’s consent. Selling stock to emigrate meant selling the household’s working capital along with it: the animals that would have supplied milk, manure, or next year’s litter were gone before the ship even sailed, which left a family with less to fall back on if the remaining members had a poor harvest the following year.

For most smallholders, stock sales were the fastest and least complicated way to raise cash, and the historical record treats livestock sales as the single most common method behind self-funded famine emigration, even though no surviving ledger totals how many families used it.

Fair days were fixed, seasonal, and public, which meant a family could not simply sell on the day it decided to emigrate. A cow or a flock of sheep had to wait for the next scheduled fair in the district, and a family racing a fixed sailing date sometimes had to sell at whatever price a smaller, unscheduled sale to a neighbour or a dealer would bring, rather than the better price the next fair might have offered.

The cost of famine emigration fare

The sums families needed to raise were not trivial. Steerage passage on ships such as the Dunbrody, now preserved as a museum vessel at New Ross, County Wexford, ran to between 3 and 4 pounds a head in the famine years, at a time when an agricultural labourer earned little more than 1 pound a month. A single fare could swallow 3 or 4 months’ wages.

Prices varied by route and by year. Deck passage on the shorter crossing to Britain from County Mayo, one step in a longer journey for some emigrants, ranged from around 4 pounds to as much as 10 pounds a person according to local records held by Mayo County Council’s library service, a spread wide enough that two neighbouring families raising money for the same year’s sailing season might still need very different sums, depending on the ship, the port, and how directly they were travelling. A family raising money in Ballina or Westport was not solving a fixed problem with a fixed price. They were guessing at a moving target and trying to raise more than they thought they would need, because a shortfall on the day of sailing meant missing the ship.

Gale day and the hanging gale

Rent in nineteenth-century Ireland was not paid monthly but on fixed quarter days, known locally as gale days, most commonly falling in spring and autumn. A tenant who could not meet gale day rent Ireland’s landlords expected twice a year was usually given some months of grace, called the hanging gale, before a landlord’s agent would seize and sell livestock to cover the arrears. That grace period cut both ways. It gave a family a narrow window in which to sell stock, gather what cash they could, and choose between paying the gale day or paying for a ticket, knowing that a cleared debt bought time but a paid passage bought an exit.

Families who chose emigration over the gale day were, in effect, weighing the value of getting a son or daughter off the holding against the value of staying current with the landlord. Given the volume of eviction notices and forced land surrenders recorded through 1847 and 1848, many households were making that calculation with very little room to spare, and a missed gale day sometimes settled the question for them before they had finished raising the fare.

Borrowing, and a debt owed to neighbours

Not every family had stock left to sell by the time they decided to emigrate. Pawnbroking was one of the oldest and most widely used forms of credit in pre-famine and famine Ireland, and a 2022 study in the Economic History Review put the value of loans passing through Irish pawnbrokers at somewhere in the region of 1 to 2 million pounds a year across the country, a figure that reflects how ordinary borrowing against household goods already was, long before famine made it a matter of survival. A family short of the fare could pawn what could not be sold outright, blankets, tools, a good coat, and count on redeeming or replacing it later, or more often, count on never redeeming it at all.

Beyond the pawnshop, raising the fare frequently meant asking a neighbour or relative for a direct loan, often with no security beyond a spoken promise and the standing of the family asking. None of this borrowing shows up as a named scheme in any government report. It survives, where it survives at all, in family memory rather than in official record, which is part of why it is so easy to overlook next to the better documented landlord and workhouse schemes.

Tenant right, a different kind of nest egg

In parts of Ulster, a custom known as tenant right gave outgoing tenants something no smallholder further south possessed: a saleable interest in the farm itself. Under the custom, an incoming tenant paid the outgoing one a lump sum, on top of the rent owed to the landlord, in exchange for the improvements made to the land and the goodwill of taking over the tenancy. Recorded tenant-right payments from the period could run to several multiples of the annual rent. One documented case from 1873 shows a 41-acre holding with an annual rent of around 19 pounds 10 shillings commanding a tenant-right payment of 435 pounds, a ratio of more than 20 to 1.

Where the custom held, a family giving up a tenancy to emigrate was not walking away with nothing. They were, in principle, selling a piece of property that farmers without the Ulster custom simply did not have. It was one of the few legal mechanisms by which an ordinary tenant family could convert years of labour on the land directly into passage money, rather than relying only on the sale of livestock or the goodwill of a landlord.

The exception: when someone else paid

Not every family faced this alone. Some landlords calculated that paying a tenant’s passage cost less than carrying an unproductive holding through years of poor rates and arrears, and ran organised schemes to clear estates by paying for the ship outright. The best documented is Major Denis Mahon’s scheme on the Strokestown Park estate in County Roscommon, where 274 household heads, roughly 1,490 people in total, had their arrears cancelled and their passage to British North America paid in full in 1847. Separately, the Poor Law Extension Act of 1849 let boards of guardians borrow against the local poor rate to pay for the emigration of workhouse inmates who had been resident a year or more. Across the whole famine decade, landlord and workhouse schemes together are estimated to have assisted the emigration of up to 120,000 people.

Set against a total outflow that ran into well over a million, that is a minority route, and for a family with no landlord clearing an estate and no board of guardians signing off a passage, it was not available at all. The fuller mechanics of who ran these schemes, who qualified, and how the two routes differed are covered in assisted emigration under the workhouse and the landlord. What follows here concerns the larger number of households who had only their own resources, and their neighbours, to work with, which was most of them, especially in the opening seasons of the famine before any organised scheme had reached their townland.

What historians cannot know

The clearest records of famine-era passage money come from landlord ledgers and Poor Law guardians’ minute books, precisely because those were institutional transactions that generated paperwork. What is far harder to reconstruct is the ordinary case: a family that sold two pigs, pawned a coat, borrowed a little from a neighbour, and put one son on a ship without ever appearing in any surviving account book.

Historians can total the numbers who travelled on landlord or workhouse money because those schemes left administrative traces. They cannot say with any precision what share of the far larger number of self-funded emigrants relied mainly on stock sales, mainly on tenant right, or mainly on borrowed money, nor how many families tried two or three of these methods in the same season and still fell short. The balance of evidence favours livestock sales as the most common single method for smallholding families without tenant right, but the surviving record was never built to answer the question completely, and any claim to a precise national breakdown should be read with that gap in mind.

Raising the fare was, for most families, its own ordeal, conducted well before anyone set foot on a ship, and largely invisible to the archive that later historians would have to work from.

Sources and further reading

• National Famine Way / Breac, University of Notre Dame: “Migration, Mobility, and Murder: The Story of the 1,490 Assisted Immigrants, from the Mahon Estate, Strokestown, County Roscommon, 1847”
• Jeanie Johnston Tall Ship Trust: “The story of the Irish emigrants that were paid to emigrate”
• Mayo County Council Library Service, local history collection: “Crossing the Atlantic”
• Dunbrody Famine Ship, New Ross, County Wexford: visitor history of steerage passage and fares
• Encyclopedia.com: “Tenant Right, or Ulster Custom”
• C. McLaughlin, “Fringe banking and financialization: Pawnbroking in pre-famine and famine Ireland,” Economic History Review, 2022

What the ticket itself cost, and how that price moved across the famine years, is covered separately in what the crossing cost. The particular pressures on families in north Mayo, where holdings were smallest and stock scarcest, are set out in county Mayo’s emigration history.