Missing Friends Database 1831-1921 Online!

Great news for those searching Irish ancestors!  A new project sponsored by Boston College’s Irish Studies Program and produced by the Office of Marketing Communications
has digitized the Boston Pilot's Missing Friends Column covering 90 years of Irish individuals seeking information their friends or family members who left Ireland for N. America. This explanation from the website:

From October 1831 through October 1921, the Boston Pilot newspaper printed a “Missing Friends” column with advertisements from people looking for “lost” friends and relatives who had emigrated from Ireland to the United States. This extraordinary collection of 41,249 records is available here as a searchable online database, which contains a text record for each ad that appeared in the Pilot.

Back in May 2010 I published a blog post about a new OliveTreeGenealogy.com project called  The Missing Friends Project. My goal was to extract the names of those who immigrated from UK to America or Canada and who were inquired about by family in various 19th Century newspapers.

My Missing Friends Project starts with Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, published in London England and their weekly column (1886-1900) called "Long Lost Relatives". I also began extracting names of those in the Boston Pilot, published in Boston Massachusetts (1831-1921).

You can search for extracted names from Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper and the Boston Pilot on my ongoing Missing Friends Project .  But don't miss this new digitization project for the Boston Pilot names !    
Search the Missing Friends Database