William Killen, who became chief justice
and chancellor of Delaware. Some of the descendants of the Irish
redemptioners in Massachusetts are found among the prominent New
Englanders of the past hundred years. The Puritans of Massachusetts
extended no welcoming hand to the Irish who had the temerity to come
among them, yet, as an historical writer has truly said, "by one of
those strange transformations which time occasionally works, it has
come to pass that Massachusetts today contains more people of Irish
blood in proportion to the total population than any other State in
the Union."

So great and so continuous was Irish immigration to Massachusetts
during the early part of the eighteenth century that on Saint
Patrick's Day in the year 1737 a number of merchants, who described
themselves as "of the Irish Nation residing in Boston," formed the
Charitable Irish Society, an organization which exists even to the
present day. It was provided that the officers should be "natives of
Ireland or of Irish extraction," and they announced that the Society
was organized "in an affectionate and Compassionate concern for their
countrymen in these Parts who may be reduced by Sickness, Shipwrack,
Old Age, and other Infirmities and unforeseen Accidents." I have
copied from the Town Books, as reproduced by the City of Boston, 1600
Irish names of persons who were married or had declared their
intentions of marriage in Boston between the years 1710 and 1790,
exclusive of 956 other Irish names which appear on the minutes
between 1720 and 1775.

In 1718, one of the largest single colonies of Irish arrived in
Boston. It consisted of one hundred families, who settled at
different places in Massachusetts. One contingent, headed by Edward
Fitzgerald, located at Worcester and another at Palmer under the
leadership of Robert Farrell, while a number went to the already
established settlement at Londonderry, N.H. About the same time a
colony of fishermen from the west coast of Ireland settled on the
Cape Cod peninsula, and I find a number of them recorded on the
marriage registers of the towns in this vicinity between 1719 and
1743. In 1720, a number of families from county Tyrone came to
Shrewsbury, and eight years later another large contingent came to
Leicester County from the same neighborhood, who gave the name of
Dublin to the section where they located. The annals of Leicester
County are rich in Irish names. On the Town Books of various pl