Original Lists of Persons of Quality, Emigrants, Religious Exiles, Political Rebels, Serving Men sold for a term of years,” etc., who were brought to the Virginia plantations between 1600 and 1700, as well as his “List of the Livinge and the Dead in Virginia in 1623,” contains numerous Celtic names, and further evidence of these continuous migrations of the Irish is contained in “A Booke of Entrie for Passengers passing beyond the Seas”, in the year 1632.  The Virginia records also show that as early as 1621 a colony of Irish people sailed from Cork in the Flying Harte under the patronage of Sir William Newce and located at what is now Newport News, and some few years later Daniel Gookin, a merchant of Cork, transported hither “great multitudes of people and cattle” from England and Ireland.

In the “William and Mary College Quarterly,” in the transcripts of the original records published by the Virginia Historical Society, and in all County histories of Virginia, there are numerous references to the Irish “redemptioners” who were brought to that colony during the seventeenth century.  But the redemptioners were not the only class who came, for the colonial records also contain many references to Irishmen of good birth and education who received grants of land in the colony and who, in turn, induced many of their countrymen to emigrate.  Planters named McCarty, Lynch, O’Neill, Sullivan, Farrell, McDonnell, O’Brien, and others denoting an ancient Irish lineage appear frequently in the early records.  Much that is romantic is found in the lives of these men and their descendants.  Some of them served in the Council chamber and the field, their sons and daughters were educated to hold place, with elegance and dignity, with the foremost of the Cavaliers, and when in after years the great conflict with England began, Virginians of Irish blood were among the first and the most eager to answer the call.  Those historians who claim that the South was exclusively an “Anglo-Saxon” heritage would be completely disillusioned were they to examine the lists of Colonial and Revolutionary troops of Celtic name who held the Indians and the British at bay, and who helped in those “troublous times” to lay the foundations of a great Republic.

There is no portion of the Atlantic seaboard that did not profit by the Irish immigrations of the seventeenth century.  We learn from the “Irish State Papers” of the year 1595 that ships were regularly plying between Ireland and Newfoundland, and so important was the trade between Ireland and the far-distant fishing banks that “all English ships bound out always made provisions that the convoy out should remain 48 hours in Cork.”  In some of Lord Baltimore’s accounts of his voyages to Newfoundland he refers to his having “sailed from Ireland” and to his “return to Ireland,” and so it is highly probable that he settled Irishmen on his Avalon plantations.  After Baltimore’s departure, Lord Falkland also sent out a number of