The Genealogy Club of Newtown will conduct its next meeting via Zoom on Wednesday, January 8, at 7 pm. The focus of the program will be research for the book, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York.

Author Tyler Anbinder is a historian who specializes in American immigration history, the history of New York City, and the era of the American Civil War. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of the 2002 film The Gangs of New York.

He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850's (1992), Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (2001), and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016).

This year he published Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, which upends beliefs about the Famine Irish in New York and beyond. Drawing on the Emigrant Savings Bank records, Anbinder will present the stories of the Irish Refugees who settled in New York and helped reshape the entire nation.

The Famine Irish were given the lowest paying jobs, experienced ridicule and discrimination, and were considered destitute as a group. In reality, the Famine immigrants did far better, far more quickly, than has previously been understood.

Anbinder will share some of his research techniques which relate to genealogical research, and discuss aspects of writing a book.

Tyler Anbinder has won several major research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Commissions's Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. His scholarship has won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the editors of Civil War History.

He was a professor at the University of Wyoming for four years and 26 years at George Washington University, where he served as chair of the History Department. He has been Professor Emeritus at GWU since 2020.

Programs of the Genealogy Club of Newtown are co-sponsored by C.H. Booth Library and are open to anyone interested in genealogy.

Registration is required and available by emailing a request including name and contact information to genclubnewtownct.secretary@gmail.com. Registration for the January 8 program is requested by January 6. An email with a link to the meeting will serve as confirmation of registration.

Those planning to attend are asked to sign in starting at 6:45 pm so that everyone will be admitted before the program begins at 7.