How a surprising detail in bank records helped a historian bust a longstanding myth about Irish immigrants

In “Plentiful Country,” historian Tyler Anbinder uses bank records to paint a new picture of the 1.3 million people who fled to the US when famine hit Ireland.

Tyler Anbinder didn’t know what he’d find when he started digging into a vast trove of records that had been locked inside a bank — and inaccessible to the public — for nearly 150 years. One detail immediately caught the historian’s attention: The accounts described in the bank’s legers had much more money in them than he expected. As he first combed through files from the Emigrant Savings Bank at the New York Public Library that day about 25 years ago, Anbinder was working on a book about the city’s famed Five Points neighborhood. That 19th-century enclave, portrayed as a battleground for warring criminals in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film “Gangs of New York,” was “notoriously overcrowded, run-down (and) impoverished,” Anbinder notes. It was also “home to more Irish immigrants than any other part of New York.” Still, the bank records Anbinder found revealed that even day laborers, who many would assume lived hand to mouth, had savings in their accounts that would amount to around $6,000 in today’s dollars. “I was really surprised … It just went against the whole reputation of Five Points that it was this terrible, impoverished place,” he says. “It’s not that they were rich, but they weren’t poor. And their bank accounts clearly showed that most of the people who lived in Five Points could afford to live elsewhere if they wanted to.”