Supported by a history of Irish emigration, with an account of the economic and social causes of this historic upheaval, the book is built around a year-by-year listing of known voyages between an Irish port and a harbor in the Maritimes, with maps showing the movement of population from specific areas in Ireland to the Maritimes, and tables providing port-by-port statistics. But this is not just a list of the 1,050 voyages from Ireland to Maritime Canada. Scattered throughout the list of voyages are the names of passengers--some gleaned directly from passenger lists, others from related sources such as land records and newspaper accounts that by chance connect passengers to the ships, while in other cases references are given to previously published passenger lists. Only 123 passenger lists of the 1,050 voyages survive, but by dint of groundbreaking research, Mr. Punch has managed to fill in many of the gaps.