Series 8 - Maghera letters

75pp

The original, handwritten transcripts of the Maghera letters are in Box 44, I-7 (Maghera parish, Derry), of the Ordnance Survey Manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. The earliest typed transcripts are in Box 45 of the Dr. Richard J. Purcell Papers at the Catholic University of America, where Kerby A. Miller first viewed them in 1972. The letters are now published on pp. 18-20 in Angélique Day and Patrick McWilliams, eds., Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Vol. 18: Parishes of County Londonderry V, 1830, 1833, 1836- 7: Maghera and Tamlaght O'Crilly (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, 1993).

The Maghera Letters consist of three letters dated 1835-36 sent from Maryland and Philadelphia by an Irish Catholic immigrant schoolmaster and his sister to their parents and uncle in Maghera parish, County Derry. Kerby A. Miller has identified the following as points of historical significance: 'The discomforts and dangers of the transatlantic voyage by sail; the causes of middle-class (Catholic) emigration from pre-Famine Ulster; the emigrants' and their families' cultural and personal debates over emigration, between recognition of American opportunities and devotion to the bonds of Irish family and community, between personal ambition and traditional communal values [...]; US economic prosperity during the speculative boom of the mid-1830s, just prior to the severe depression wrought by the Panic of 1837.' The collection includes: typed transcripts of the letters; photocopies of the original handwritten transcripts of the letters from the Ordnance Survey Manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; photocopied pages of the Maghera OS Survey; and Miller's research notes.