Immigrants and savers: A rich new database on the Irish in 1850s New York

ABSTRACT

A new dataset created from the first 18,000 savings accounts opened (from 1850 to 1858) at the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York City is described. The bank was founded by Irish Americans, and most of its depositors in its first decade of operations were recent Irish immigrants. The data offer a unique window on both savings behavior by the poor and not-so-poor in antebellum New York and on how emigrants who came primarily from rural parts of Ireland adapted to urban life. They also contain much that is new on the regional origins of mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants and on their settlement patterns in New York.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish immigration
• New York
• savings behavior
• social mobility

Acknowledgements

Over several years, many students from George Washington University painstakingly transcribed the original bank records that form the basis of our database. The authors want to thank all of these students and especially acknowledge Hope McCaffrey, Katie Carper, Caitlyn Borghi, and Lindsay Chervinsky for their great efforts. Several individuals helped with the maps for this article. Richard Hinton (GWU) constructed the Ireland maps, and Nora Santiago (Urban Policy Analyst, CSI) and Amanda Schettini (Student Intern, CSI) created the New York City map. Mike Murphy of University College Cork very generously supplied us with GIS shape files for Ireland. Janet Schwartz, our project genealogist, tracked down many depositors in the U.S. census records; her detective work has helped enrich this project and unearth details of the lives of many depositors. The authors also thank Brendan Mac Suibhne of Centenary University for his helpful comments. Lastly, the authors wish to thank the two anonymous referees who helped make this a better article.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Collaborative Grant RZ-51352-11).

Notes

1. They are related to a more general trend across Europe in the late eighteenth century, which gained steam after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The first savings bank in Germany, for example, opened its doors in 1778 in Hamburg ( Guinnane 2002, 84).

2. The database based on the 5% sample, labeled “Revised JAH data,” can be found at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/18051

3. The original documents are held in the New York Public Library. Kevin J. Rich (2001–2010 ) has transcribed some of the data in the Test Books.

4. Data from the project is available as “Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Data” at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/anbinder

5. It is clear from the handwriting that several bank employees entered information into the Test Books, but a single employee recorded the information for about half of the accounts.

6. Occupation is missing for 14.8% of the depositors. For another 5%, the Test Books specified that the depositor had no occupation (as distinct from the information being missing). For the remainder, the occupation is specified.

7. We used the earliest available IPUMS (USA) occupation codes, those IPUMS used for the 1850 to 1900 IPUMS samples. More information is available at https://usa.ipums.org/usa/volii/occ1880.shtml (accessed August 6, 2016).

8. Individual accounts are those owned by one person, while joint accounts had two or more owners.

9. For an overview of New York City in this period, see Anbinder (2016, 129–88). For more on the Sixth Ward of New York City, see Ó Gráda (1999, 114–21).

10. It may well be that there was a cultural aspect to savings behavior, but the possibility that non-Irish savers were more inclined to have other accounts in other savings banks cannot be ruled out.

11. A total of 569 individuals in the Depositor File make up this group.

12. Many who settled in the United States at this time were able to earn higher wages than they had been able to in Ireland, and some were able to help family members there make the overseas journey as well. By the 1880s, within some ethnic groups, up to 50% of immigrants arriving in the United States were traveling on pre-paid tickets ( Hatton and Williamson 1998, 14).

13. The statistical distribution of depositors in Ward 1, for example, with a smaller CV number, means that most depositors in this ward saved similar amounts. A higher CV number shows that the ability to save was more dissimilar across depositors. The CV measure allows one to compare variability across different populations; the Sharpe ratio in finance is essentially a CV and is used to compare the variability of returns across all different types of asset classes.