The Imirce Project: Collecting Irish emigrant letters and life stories from North America, ca. 1680-1990

Imirce provides access to thousands of letters and life stories composed by Irish emigrants to North America from the seventeenth century through to the late-twentieth century. This resource was made possible by an extraordinary donation of collected material from historian Kerby A. Miller -- Curators’ Professor of History at the University of Missouri (emeritus) and author of the landmark, Pulitzer Prize nominated publication "Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America" (Oxford, 1985).

Since 2024 when the digital repository was launched online, the project has been expanded to include hundreds of new items received from members of the public in Ireland, North America and further afield. The call for further contributions remains ongoing and further details can be found on the project's website.

For scholars of Irish and North American history, Imirce offers a deep-dive into firsthand accounts of the lives of generations of emigrants, written from differing perspectives influenced by religion, class and gender. For the descendants of Irish emigrants, Imirce is an opportunity to reconnect, across the broad Atlantic, with the home that they left behind.