This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/0AC.2ACI/2616.1 Message Board Post: Until the 1890s, immigration through Canada into the US was unregulated. Records were not kept at a national or local level. As the NARA website states, many immigrants chose this route to avoid US immigration inspection. Convenient for them but not much help to us as their descendants! NARA does have records, known as the "St. Albans List" of immigrants from Canada through St. Albans starting in 1895. "Flight From Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada" by Donald MacKay does not list names but is a good book to read about background information that may pertain to the Irish immigrants who eventually ended up in Rutland. I recommend it. Below are a few quotes that I found interesting since my Mumford family may have immigrated through Canada and arrived in Rutland county in the 1830s. MacKay quotes from the weekly logs of the Emigration Agent for 1836 and 1837: 1836, week ending Aug 6 - ...very many (immigrants) are induced to go to the United States, owing to exaggerated accounts of wages given them on the numerous railroads and canals at present in construction. 1836, week ending Aug 13 - ...Very many of the Irish have gone to the States ... 1837, week ending May 20 - Some ... have gone to the United States, notwithstanding the unfavorable accounts received from there, and the utter impossibility of persons of the working class obtaining employment. MacKay notes that, as more Irish Catholics immigrated to Canada, sectarian violence increased from about 1835 to 1837, Irish Catholics rioting with both Irish Protestants and French-Canadians. Perhaps this was another reason that the Irish moved on to the States, perhaps to Rutland. MacKay also describes the voyage of the Irish to Canada. "...In normal years the bulk of the emigrants, as letters and diaries suggest, found the voyage more uncomfortable and tedious than horrendous..." (p2l2) Seasickness and storms seemed to be the biggest problems. But emigrants sometimes suffered far worse privations and illnesses, according to MacKay. Water was bad, food ran out, many died at sea or at Grosse Isle of fever, typhus and cholera. "...Speculators chartered steerage space at the cheapest price they could and sent commission agents into the countryside to recruit as many emigrants as possible to fill the space. These men...spun fanciful yarns of shipboard facilities, often claiming the vessels were twice as big as they actually were, and glibly assuring potential passengers that the voyage would be short, three weeks at most.. and a kindly captain would look after their needs like a father. " ... There were complaints of ships failing by as much as a month to meet their advertised departure dates, which meant emigrants (waiting in the ports) had to exhaust whatever savings they had put aside to start their new lives." (pl99) "Few emigrant ships had been built to carry passengers. Most were aging cargo vessels, three-masted barks and two-masted brigs, the workhorses of the North Atlantic, vessels of 350 tons or less with holds so shallow and wide that unless they were well loaded with ballast they rolled like a drunk in the slightest seaway ... "... Once a ship discharged its timber, loose boards were laid over the bilges as temporary flooring and rows of rough berths little bigger than dog kennels were fitted in place and covered with straw for bedding. A couple of rickety wooden privies nailed to the foredeck scuppers completed the transformation from timber drogher to emigrant ship, where hundreds of women, men and children were fated to live for at least a month and a half, and sometimes as long as three months if contrary winds blew a ship off course. Even in fine weather with the hatches off there was little light or ventilation. but in rough weather with hatches battened the steerage was like a dungeon lit with smoky kerosene lamps and filled with a fog of sweat, spilled chamber pots, rotting scraps of food. and the vomit of seasick humanity. All around lay luggage, bags, sacks and boxes. No effort was made to segregate unmarried women from the men until the 1850s." (pl99)