The graph above shows the number of Irish immigrants to the US in the 1800's. What we'd like to figure out is how many Garveys came to the US during these same years.

The Griffith Valuation listed about one million Irish land holders in the mid-1800's - out of a total population of around 6 million Irish. About 500 of these land holders were Garveys. Based on this, we can guess that about one out of every 2000 Irishmen was a Garvey (which means there were about 3000 Garveys in Ireland at that time). If we assume that the Irish immigrating to the US had the same proportion of Garveys then we can estimate the number of Garveys immigrating to the US each year by dividing the above graph by 2000 (0.05% of the total).

Comparing the Garveys in passenger lists on Family Tree Maker's FTM#357, FTM#264, FTM#273, and FTM#256 (pink line) against "one in 2000 Irish immigrants" (blue line)looks like:

The pink and blue lines are about the same shape in the 1840-1863 range. That means that Family Tree Maker did a fairly complete job of covering those years in their FTM#357. However the entries on Vol 1 only go up to about 1865. The entries after that are from FTM#264 - and clearly the coverage was quite a bit more "patchy" in Vol. 2. For example, it can be seen that they included almost no entries from the 1870's.

Compare this with the entries in the list transcribed from the LDS microfilm:

The proportion of Garveys among the Irish immigrants was actually probably higher than that seen in Griffith's Valuation. Two of the three places from which the Garveys originated were the places in Ireland hardest hit by The Famine - County Kerry and Connaught. Therefore it could be expected that a higher percentage of the immigrants were Garveys than in the general population.

The close agreement between the graph of Family Tree Maker entries and the 0.05% of immigrants indicates that these estimates of the numbers of Garveys coming to the US are probably fairly accurate. A second "order of magnitude" check is provided by the 1880 census. If the "one Garvey in 2000 Irish immigrants" figure is correct then about 1800 Garveys would have immigrated to the United States in the period of 1825 to 1890. The 1880 US Census shows that about 1000 of the 4000 Garveys in the US were born in Ireland. Allowing for the fact that a large percentage of Garveys who immigrated in the 1820's-50's would have died by 1880, we can see that the "one in 2000" figure is certainly in the ballpark of the correct number.

Out of the 1800 Garveys estimated to have immigrated to the US in this period, Ship Passenger Lists are only available for about 500 Garveys. That means that if all these "estimates piled upon estimates" are anywhere near correct then that would indicate that Ship Passenger Lists are unavailable for about 2/3's of the Garveys. The patchy coverage of transcribed Passenger mentioned above may be a large part of this, and the large number of Irish who came to the US overland from Canada may also account for the lack of many Garvey Ship Passenger lists. We can also estimate that there were more Garveys in the US than in Ireland by about the mid-1860's.