31 July 2003 - Griffith’s Primary Valuation of Ireland Online

New Internet-based genealogy service will be a boon for 80 million members of the Irish Diaspora world-wide including 40 million people with Irish ancestry in the US and 15 million people with Irish ancestry in Britain

Recent research studies have shown that genealogy is the largest hobby in North America, where it is conservatively estimated that between one and two million people are actively involved in tracing their family history every year.

Genealogy is now the fastest growing hobby in Britain, where an estimated 15 million people have Irish ancestry. In the US an estimated 40 million people have Irish ancestry.

Eneclann Ltd and Origins.net, in association with the National Library of Ireland, are making the complete Griffith’s Valuation of Ireland available on the world-wide web.

This monumental 19th century work is the principal tool of genealogists and local historians. It contains information on 1.4 million people – from the smallest farmer to the largest landlord – in the period during and after the Famine.

The availability of this information on-line will be a huge resource for the tens of thousands of Irish people and members of the Irish Diaspora who are currently involved in researching their ancestry. It will also be of great interest to the estimated 200 local history societies in Ireland and 11,000 family history societies in the US.

The new web edition can be accessed, on a pay per view basis, at www.irishorigins.com It will be available free of charge to readers in the National Library of Ireland.

The Primary Valuation of Ireland 1847-1864 – commonly known as Griffith’s Valuation became the most comprehensive survey of households available for the 19th century after most of the census records as well as Church of Ireland parish registers for the 19th century were destroyed during the Civil War (when the Public Record Office burned down in 1922).

The new web edition was launched today, Thursday 31 July, by one of Ireland’s leading historians, Thomas Pakenham (author of Year of Liberty and The Scramble for Africa).

Speaking at the launch of the new service, Mr Brendan O Donoghue, Director of the National Library said.

No library in any country in the world, including Ireland, has a full set of the Valuation. The new web edition contains all the revisions and amended versions that were published during the 17 years it took to complete the Valuation. As such, users of this new web resource can be sure that they have all the source material at hand in one place. They will be able to search a complete database of personal and place names, and then access scanned images of the original published pages.

According to the Eneclann Ltd founder and Managing Director, Brian Donovan, research studies on what motivates people to trace their ancestry have shown some interesting findings.

Finding roots is not the main issue. Furthermore, it is no longer a matter of elitism: people want interesting stories and they particularly relish stories of ancestors who ‘made it’ despite their poverty. Among the economic drivers of the phenomenal increase in popularity of this hobby in North America and Britain is the growth of the ‘grey’ dollar/euro/pound – older people have time and money, and history and family history is their favoured hobby.

 

The Griffith’s Valuation acts as a census substitute for the mid-nineteenth century. The launch of this on-line edition marks the first time that the entire survey has been published since it was originally issued in the 19th century, Mr Donovan concluded.

END

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