This posting is certainly a fabulous gift to the mailing list. Since there are millions of Irish emigrants yo8u might need to do a little leg work to find your family's records. I have found ships passenger lists a wonderful source of information about many members of our family who emigrated from Ireland around the turn of the century. The National Archives (which has regional offices in many cities and central HQ in Wash.D.C.) has indexes of passengers by name entering all ports of the US - except for one glaring omission - entries into the Port of New York during the last third of the 19th century. One index handles entries up to the beginning of the 20th century. The other has entries from about 1890 onwards- they overlap somewhat. They are films of block printed index cards filmed two across on narrow film, so they are not always easy reading. And the transcription is not always accurate. It helps to know some particulars - especially town of last residence in Ireland and possible relatives names to sort through them all. The regional offices also have some microfilms of the actual ships manifests which are filed by port and date. These can be found by using the name index. In Philadelphia I found the films of original manifests for Philadelphia, Baltimore and several souther ports. I spent a few hours tracking down each one because there are often around 500 names on each manifest, but it was worth the effort. Be sure to make a large xerox of the pages of ships manifests that you find because you might find some other interesting names of friend, godparents inlaws, etc. bundled near your known relatives. Good searching! Dennis Dennis Weeks Chairman, Dept. of Fine and Performing Arts