"She and her mother landed at Castle Garden and walked up Broadway to City Hall, with bundles of clothes and pots and featherbeds in their arms. The singing of the then exposed telegraph wires frightened them, as did the bustle of the people in the streets. They lost their fear when they met an Irish policeman who directed them to a boarding house on Baxter Street."¹

Could this be your ancestor's story? William Alfred's great-grandmother told this anecdote about her arrival in the United States around 1866, but it could have been told by many Irish immigrants who debarked at the port of New York at this time.

Without firsthand accounts by our immigrant ancestors describing their experiences of coming to America-daily life in their new home, what it was like to be foreigners in a strange land-we can only imagine what their lives were like. Fortunately, ethnicity has taken a front seat for social historians. For genealogists, this bounty of research can be harvested to fill the gaps in our family history.

Social historians today are scrupulously examining the American communities of our ethnic ancestors. By researching social history publications about the common experiences our ancestors may have shared, we will learn what life was like for our immigrant ancestors as well. A good source of information on a particular ethnic group rather than a specific family is the university library. Library holdings, which are now accessible via computer, use the same author, title, and subject indexes with which you are familiar; however, you can locate information on specific topics by using the computer's "keyword." When you type keywords, a list of a few books is displayed rather than the hundreds often found under a single subject.

To aid you in working with keywords and subject headings, most university libraries carry in the reference department the four volumes of the Library of Congress Subject Headings. This listing is an accumulation of subject headings established by the Library of Congress since 1898. Subject headings are linked to other subject headings through cross-references, now expressed as Broader Topics and Narrower Topics.

For example, in one university library computer card catalog, typing Emigration-Immigration yields 232 titles, US-emigration-immigration 91 titles, New York (NY)-emigration-immigration 20 titles, New York (NY)-emigration-immigration-Irish 4 titles.

To use the university collection, work from the broad topic to the narrow topic-for example, from "Immigrants" to "Irish Americans" and from "Irish Americans" to "Irish in New York." A number of topics on immigrant groups will display a list of relevant works of a general nature. Using keywords such as Ethnicity, Ethnic studies, Ethnic groups, Immigration, Emigration, and Immigrants will elicit titles of general reference sources. One of the best-known and highly regarded sources on ethnicity is the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethic Groups. Each author is a specialist on a particular ethnic group and provides a general overview of why immigrants left their homelands during different time periods, where they settled, and what experiences they shared. Books like the Harvard Encyclopedia give a broad picture of emigration and immigration.

To narrow the focus, search the computer catalog for a specific immigrant population, such as Irish Americans or Irish Immigration. This technique is applicable to any ethnic background.

"For Irishmen coming to American arriving in May and June was ideal with no harsh seas, warmer winds and brighter sunlight. Outdoor work was easier to get and they could sleep outdoors if necessary. Many other left Ireland in fall after the harvest so they had enough money to pay the ship passage with some left over."²

Would this information help you narrow the search for your ancestor's ship passenger list, especially during the unindexed years (1847-1896) of the port of New York? Working from the general to the specific with the goal of finding what has been published that directly relates to our ancestors' lives, use keywords like Immigrants-New York to Irish-New York to Irish-New York-Women, becoming more and more specific in the search. This same principle applies when searching periodical sources.

In the reference section of a university library you will find America: History and Life, a series of annual indexes (with some five-year compilations) of article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations of the United States and Canada. It also has author, subject, and title indexes. Working from the broad topics of ethnicity and immigration to the more specific titles of Irish and Irish Americans, you will locate periodical articles and dissertations describing life as your ancestor lived it.

Perhaps Hasia R. Diner's work, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century, would provide insight into your great-grandmother's life as a single Irish woman who came to America at that time. If she lived and worked in New York City, Carol Groveman's article "Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York: The Irish Women Experience: in the Journal of Urban History may offer more details about her life in a city full of single Irish working women.

Books often lead to other books or other published material. The authors of many ethnic social histories provide a bibliography of printed sources on which they based their books or articles. Books are even published on ethnic groups that are themselves bibliographies of material available to the researcher. In The Irish in America: A Guide to the Literature and Manuscript Collections, Patrick J. Blessing gathered bibliographic references for hundreds of sources on the Irish in America under one cover. He divided the book into chapters, working from the all-encompassing "Bibliographies, Biographical Dictionaries, and General Guides" to more specific topics, such as "Irish in Places," which is arranged by states.

Under New York, a bibliographic entry for Franklin M. Danaher's paper "Early Irish in Old Albany, New York, read before the American-Irish Historical Society in 1903, explains life in Albany for the pre-famine Irish. "The Irish Aristocracy of Albany, 1798-1878," by William E. Rowley, published in the New York Historical Journal, states that "in 1820 2% of the population of Albany was Irish; by 1855 Irish Catholics represented the largest single ethnic group in Albany."

Though my examples are for Irish immigrants, the same method of research can be followed for any ethnic group. Use general reference works to give the broad view of emigration and immigration from the foreign country to America. Then narrow the focus and look for more specific titles for your specific ethnic ancestry. Working to a more specific topic, combine keywords in the computer card catalog to locate publications on an ethnic background in a particular place or time (Boston in the colonial era), for a particular age or sex (children or women), or a certain occupation (canal builder, policeman, or seamstress). Social historians are continually researching and publishing their studies on ethnic groups. Genealogists can benefit from their interest in ethnicity by using historians' meticulous work to describe similar experiences their ancestors shared.

Blessing, Patrick J. The Irish in America: A Guide to the Literature and Manuscript Collections. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992.

Danaher, Franklin M. "Early Irish in Old Albany, New York," American-Irish Historical Society Record, 1903.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Groveman, Carol. "Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York: The Irish Women's Experience," Journal of Urban History 1978 4 (3):225-74.

Library of Congress Subject Headings. 17th ed., 4 vols. Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service, 1994.