Milwaukee’s Early Irish and the Role of the Church in Diasporic Urban American Settlement and Assimilation, 1890-1922

Abstract

Anthropologists recognize social institutions, such as families, schools, marketplaces, and churches, to be integral to the survival of urban immigrant diasporas. Scholars such as Harold Mytum (1994), Michael Parker Pearson (1982), and Jörn Staecker (2000) view churchyard archaeology and the demographics of parishes as important tools in the study of historic corporate cultures and historic, transnational diasporas. This study addresses the corporate nature of foreign-born Irish immigrants arriving in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the last decade of the nineteenth century (c.1890-1900). The homogeneity of residential patterning associated with this Irish diaspora was tested by analyzing the parish records of Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church. The findings of this research project (t(194)=1.49, p