“The Best Country in the World”: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish-Famine Immigrants

The main dataset ("ESB Mobility Database") contains occupational data on 1,200 Irish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in the Famine years and could be tracked for at least a decade. We also present the most up-to-date version of our Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database, which contains data on all 15,000 people who opened accounts at the bank from 1850 to 1858. Also provided are data from the 1855 New York State census documenting the occupations of New York's entire Irish-born population as well as datasets documenting the occupations held by New York's Irish immigrants one year and ten years after their arrival in America,