Researchers interested in the motivations and experiences of British emigrants to North America and Australia can explore a wide range of curated primary sources in Adam Matthew’s new historical collection, Migration to New Worlds. Pamphlets such as Boy Settlement in Canada and Australia Invites the British Domestic Girl were designed to entice new settlers, and this collection includes a wide range of descriptive narratives in the form of correspondence, scrapbooks and books that document the voyage, living conditions and economic opportunities for newcomers.
Drawn from documents collected by historical societies, maritime and immigration museums and records and archives, digitized primary sources include photos, government records, shipping papers, logbooks, maps, water colors, oral histories and other unique manuscript sources. While the majority of materials look at European emigrant groups, there are also materials about Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the USA and, grouped under the theme “remigration”, records of the movement of Indian and Chinese indentured laborers from plantations in the West and East Indies.
Browsing by theme is a strength of many Adam Matthew primary source collections, and this one does not disappoint. Documents are organized into 13 thematic areas (e.g. Motives for Emigration or Journey Conditions); the introductory page for each theme presents a short essay that highlights relevant and notable examples from the archive, linking to both the explicated item and the relevant collection. These detailed and thoughtful introductions present the primary sources with essential context and have many applications for teaching and learning.
Individual documents can be listed, filtered by theme or searched, and the themes are visible next to each document’s title on the search results page. Most documents that originated in print are searchable; most manuscript documents are not transcribed or searchable but are carefully described both in narrative and with metadata. A Popular Searches option and the advanced search form offer easy access to these index terms.
In addition to browsing the thematic essays or searching the documents, users can explore aspects of the immigrant experience through editorially selected highlights, three galleries of visual images and four interactive resources. An interactive migration map plots census data on migration over time, allowing users to visualize migration to or from the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand on a graph and a map.
Other interactives mimic a museum visit, organizing photos of artifacts from a reconstructed scene. Floorplans from immigrant apartments recreated by the Tenement Museum are illustrated with photos of furnishings and artifacts from their collection, and diagrams and photos of the Victorian emigrant ship Star of India from the San Diego Maritime Museum represent aspects of the voyage that may not have been documented in other sources. The Grosse Ile narrative mimics a walking tour of the island’s facilities in the present day, some reconstructed and some not.
Documents from the collection may be downloaded and copied for educational use. Audio and video files of oral histories from the Tenement Museum in New York can be streamed online; searchable transcripts are also available, and video or sound clips (as well as images) can be selected and saved in a My Archive folder for later use.
Finally, a group of 11 essays by curators and scholars develop historical interpretations around the stories contained in the archive, offering broader background and research about immigrant groups or government policies and processes.
This review has focused on the first module of the collection, The Century of Migration, 1,800-1924. A second module focusing on the Modern Era (not available at the time of review but now released (editor)) promises to add documents from the twentieth century from 14 archives and libraries with attention paid to American immigration societies and refugees and displaced persons. This resource is also complemented by Adam Matthew’s Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters (RR 2017/088), which has an emphasis on early records of settlers in colonies.
