The Uncounted Irish: In Canada and the United States

John Kendle is a professor of History at St. John’s College,
University of Manitoba, and author of Ireland and the Federal Solution.

The Uncounted Irish was written by two genealogists who are anxious to
display the merits of genealogical research. Using their own family
history as a connecting thread, Fitzgerald and King trace the shifting
fortunes of a number of Irish families as they move from West Cork to
New Brunswick and the wilds of the Miramachi; to the lumbering and
farming communities of Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; and
eventually to the Pacific Northwest. The book’s central arguments are
that the Irish settled in rural Canada and America in far larger numbers
than previously believed and that the overriding experience of the Irish
for many decades was probably more rural than urban. These arguments are
familiar to those who have read the recent work of Donald Akenson, but
Fitzgerald and King are able to buttress the contentions by
back-breaking genealogical work. They demonstrate that the Irish
component in the Canadian and American populations has been seriously
underestimated.

Their main contention—that genealogists have much to contribute to
historical understanding—is irrefutable, but this book all too often
reveals why historians tend to be unduly dismissive of genealogical
publications. Apart from being a discursive potpourri of chapters on a
bewildering range of topics interspersed with autobiographical snippets,
the book and most of its individual chapters lack any context or
interpretative framework. The unfortunate result is that the popular
reader will not be well rewarded and the historian of rural North
America, and particularly of the lumbering industry, will be frustrated
by the authors’ failure to explore the wider implications of their
hard-won findings.