1666 and 1690, we find people named Connell, Daly, Larkin, Shaw, Hogan, and Finn, all Irishmen, and in Jonathan Pearson’s “Genealogies of the First Settlers of the Ancient County of Albany” and in his “Genealogies of the First Settlers of the Patent and City of Schenectady”, I find 135 distinctive Irish names.  These were mostly merchants, farmers, artisans, millers, and backwoodsmen, the pioneers, who, with their Dutch neighbors, blazed the trail of civilization through that section, rolled back the savage redman, and marked along the banks of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers the sites of future towns and cities.  In the rate lists of Long Island between 1638 and 1675, I find Kelly, Dalton, Whelan, Condon, Barry, Powers, Quin, Kane, Sweeney, Murphy, Reilly, as well as Norman-Irish and Anglo-Irish names that are common to Irish nomenclature.  Hugh O’Neale was a prominent resident of Newtown, L.I., in 1655.  In a “Report to the Lord President,” dated September 6, 1687, Governor Dongan recommended “that natives of Ireland be sent to colonize here where they may live and be very happy.”  Numbers of them evidently accepted the invitation, for many Irishmen are mentioned in the public documents of the Province during the succeeding twenty years.

That the Irish continued to settle in the Province all through the eighteenth century may be seen from the announcements in the New York newspapers of the time and other authentic records.  The most important of these, in point of numbers and character of the immigrants, were those made in Orange County in 1729 under the leadership of James Clinton from Longford, and at Cherry Valley, in Otsego County, twelve years later.  On the Orange County assessment and Revolutionary rolls, and down to the year 1800, there is a very large number of Irish names, and in some sections they constituted nearly the entire population.  In the northwestern part of New York, Irishmen are also found about the time of the Franco-English war.  They were not only among those settlers who followed the peaceful pursuits of tilling and building, but they were “the men behind the guns” who held the marauding Indians in check and repelled the advances of the French through that territory.  In this war, Irish soldiers fought on both sides, and in the “Journals of the Marquis of Montcalm” may be seen references to the English garrison at Oswego, which, in August, 1756, surrendered to that same Irish Brigade by which they had been defeated eleven years before on the battlefield of Fontenoy.  In the “Manuscripts of Sir William Johnson”, are also found some interesting items indicating that Irishmen were active participants in the frontier fighting about that time, and in one report to him, dated May 28, 1756, from the commandant of an English regiment, reference is made to “the great numbers of Irish Papists among the Delaware and Susquehanna Indians who have done a world of prejudice to English interests.”