ABSTRACT
The Boston Pilot was an immensely popular newspaper, distributed widely throughout the world of Irish immigrants. The column 'Missing Friends' ran in the Boston newspaper from 1831 to 1916, after which it was suspended shortly after the weekly paper was purchased by the Archdiocese of Boston. The earliest emigrants came from the provinces of Ulster and Leinster, and in the Pilot data we can see this depicted in the diminished proportions of persons from those regions over time for which searches appear in the column. Although the various United States censuses record the number of immigrants arriving from Ireland, and the British censuses also indicate numbers of persons whose birthplace was Ireland, there are no systematic records to identify the places in Ireland from which they came. This is also consistent with Pilot evidence from County Cork, where emigrants tended to be persons with higher skills from parishes with advantages such as schooling and improved communication systems such as roads.
