By Sean O' Driscoll

Father Peter Meehan opens up a giant ledger and peers down its pages. Mary from Co. Donegal, age 18, was going to a cousin’s house in New York.

Sheila from Cork was going to Brooklyn. Maire from Kerry is staying in the Bronx.

One 8-year-old McCarthy girl was going to an aunt and uncle on Pearl Street in Manhattan.

In the four ledgers he keeps at Our Lady of the Rosary church in downtown Manhattan are the lives of over 60,000 Irish women who were forced from poor houses and on to emigrant ships in the 19th and early 20th century.

He found them in a vault in the church at the tip of Manhattan, where once an organization called the Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls provided temporary shelters for young women to keep them from the pimps, thieves and sweatshop owners who lined the docks looking for easy prey.

The ledgers are one of the most valuable records ever found of Irish emigration to the U.S., giving a far fuller picture of the women’s lives than records at Ellis Island.

Carefully turning the page on one of the ledgers, Meehan shows the handwritten entries with the name, age, county of origin and destination address of each of the 60,000 girls. (Some 120,000 women passed through the doors but only half the records have been found.)

The potential of the find is enormous says Karen Aleta, a program director at Pace University’s School of Education, which is using a team of volunteers to enter all the ledger’s details onto a computer database.

“We have far more data here than on Ellis Island — we know where these girls came from in Ireland and where they were going, we can follow it right through. It’s so exciting,” she said.

The Pace group is hoping to cross-reference the volumes with Ellis Island records, creating a much more complete picture of the women’s arrival into the U.S.

Meehan, a soft spoken man and one time liberal activist within the church, turns another page, showing the huge range of counties and destinations.

“I found one for Oregon!” he says excitedly. “How on earth were they supposed to get there? If they wanted to sail there they’d have to go around the tip of South America.”

All the names recorded tell a painful story. All the women came from the poorhouses of Ireland, and most are from the traumatized generations that followed the famine, parentless and working for food in overcrowded government shelters across Ireland.

As a way of depopulating the rural areas, the British government felt that it was best to send the young women to America before they started having children.

“They would ask the girls if they knew someone in America. If they did, they were sent on a ship. Many of them had nothing more than a slip of paper with the name of a relative they had never met,” says Meehan.

It is, historians say, a hugely overlooked part of Irish history. Without economic or political power, the women simply disappeared in huge numbers, their names lost to history until Meehan made a chance discovery while examining the vaults of the church.

The value of the ledgers has not been lost on genealogy groups that are eager to record their contents.

The Mormon Church and other groups interested in genealogy have made “very generous offers” to be allowed to photocopy the records and put them online, says Meehan.

But he turned down the offers, preferring to go with Pace University and hoping one day to create an internet database of the records, which date from 1883 to 1926.

As he speaks, we can hear the loud thumping of construction equipment outside. The church, just yards from where emigrant ships disembarked at the tip of Manhattan, is surrounded by looming office blocks and the muddy construction site of a new subway station.

“These records are from a disappearing world,” he says with a smile, pointing out where the construction work has damaged the interior of the rectory.

The records, he says, are only a small, linear recording of a vast emigrant story.

“There would be guys waiting at the docks to take these girls to lodging houses but would disappear with their bags. Others were led up to Five Points and into vice,” says Meehan.

“Others were sent into terrible indentureships. These girls would sign up as servants for twenty years and couldn’t escape. The mission helped them to escape that. You don’t see that in the ledgers.

“The mission was very protective,” he adds. “It wouldn’t let anyone collect the girls unless they could show that their names exactly matched the relatives’ names held by the girls.”

It was more than three years after discovering the ledgers that Meehan began to realize their true importance.

After looking around for a sponsor to save the ledgers from rot, Meehan got limited funding from the Homeland and Hougouton Foundations as well as the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

After Pace helped design a system to preserve the records on computer, volunteers have been entering the records at weekends.

A quick examination of the records finds names from every county in Ireland. Most of the girls appeared to be in their late teens, but some were as young as eight or as old as 40.

“Unfortunately, our records only go as far as 1892,” said Meehan. “We’re not opening it to the public until we get it all on computer, but then it will be an amazing record for people.”

He sees the records as a reminder, in these scandal-hit times, that the church has done some good.

“The church has got some real black eyes recently. It’s sexist, it’s authoritarian, it’s had the terrible sex scandals. These books show that the church has done some good, and it’s something we have to share,” Meehan said.

Before Meehan closed over the giant ledger, he takes one last look at names neatly arranged in lines down the page. He wants these names, he says, to be a reminder.

“Now in America we have xenophobes who want to put barbed wired and machine gun towers to stop the immigrants,” he said. “But I think that this place would serve as an inspiration to them all.”