This is the master volume to the 28 book set on Irish Family History from the Irish Genealogical Foundation. The largest and most comprehensive of the series, this volume includes family histories from every county in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It also has, for the first time, the complete surname index for the entire series. The 27 other books which are indexed in this volume will provide additional information on even more families.

Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

The migration caused by Ireland's potato famine gave Birmingham the fourth highest Irish-born population of any English or Welsh town in the mid-1800s. This book examines this important aspect of English-Irish history, and explains how events in Birmingham have influenced Irish political figures.

Irish music enjoyed popularity across Europe and North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Regional circumstances created a unique reception for such music in the English Midlands. This book is a musical ethnography of Birmingham, 1950–2010. Initially establishing geographical and chronological parameters, the book cites Birmingham’s location at the hub of a road and communications network as key to the development of Irish music across a series of increasingly visible, public sites: Birmingham’s branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was established in the domestic space of an amateur musician; Birmingham’s folk clubs encouraged a blend of Irish music with socialist politics, from which the Dublin singer Luke Kelly honed his trade; Irish solidarity was fostered in Birmingham’s churches. Each of these examples begins with a performance at Birmingham Town Hall in order to show how a single venue also provides musical representations that are mutable over time. The culmination is Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade. This, the largest Irish procession outside Dublin and New York, manifests an incoherent blend of sounds. The audio montage, nevertheless, creates a coherent metanarrative: one in which the local community has conquered a number of challenges (most especially that of the IRA bombings of the area) and has moved Irish music from private arenas to the centre of this large civic event.

This work is a sequel to The Irish Victorian City. As a collection of national and regional studies, it reflected the consensus view of the subject by describing both the degree of the demoralization of the Irish immigrants into Britain for the early and mid-Victorian period, when they figured so largely in the official parliamentary and social reportage of the day; and then, in spite of every obvious difficulty posed by poverty, crime, disease, and prejudice, the positive aspect of the Irish Catholic achievement in the creation of enduring religious and political communities towards the end of the nineteenth century.