Thomas Kelly of Doolough Farm, Jurby, who emigrated to Ohio in 1827 and kept the best of the Manx emigrant diaries.

He left the Island on 6 July 1827, taking with him his father, his sister, his wife and five daughters, and ten others went with them. His letter home was printed in the Manx Sun on 18 March 1828, setting out how much better things were in America and naming the Duke of Atholl's chief tithe proctor, James McCrone, among the people the emigrants were glad to have left behind.

The diary he kept is the reason he is remembered. Of the several that survive from the Manx emigration it is the best known, and also the most attractive and the most reflective. He was still writing in 1845, nearly twenty years after he left, and was then very conscious of how much work there still was to do.