Irish Historical Records
– Survival
The poor rate of survival of many Irish historical records
is a central theme to the story of Irish genealogy. The
destruction of the Public Records Office of Ireland in 1922
is, of course, the most famous archival disaster in Irish
history. Yet, the long history of the destruction of historic
Irish records includes a fire in the Custom Office in 1711
and another in the Bermingham Tower in Dublin Castle in
1758.
For researchers, the problem of these earlier disasters
is that the records were not comprehensively indexed and
so we do not know exactly what was lost. Broadly speaking
we know that the main classes of records stored there were
the legal, financial and administrative records of the 13th
to the 17th centuries, marking the transition from the medieval
Irish Lordship to the Irish Kingdom.
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Conversely, we have a much clearer idea of the extent of
destruction in 1922. Records destroyed include the Census
of Ireland returns, between 1821 and 1851; more than half
of all parish registers of the Anglican Church of Ireland
which were deposited there after 1869; the majority of wills
and testamentary records proved in Ireland to that date.
Other records destroyed included the pre-1900 records of
local government; pre-1900 legal records from the Irish
courts; and the majority of all Irish export and trade records
from the 18th Century onwards, transferred from the Customs
House to the Public Records Office shortly before 1922.
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Yet archival disasters alone do not
fully explain the huge gaps in Irish historic records;
there is also the legacy of Ireland's colonial past.
The Tudor reconquest of Ireland in the 16th century,
and the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations (1650s-90s),
undermined civil society in Ireland and badly affected
both the creation and survival of many records.
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By the early 18th century, probably more than 75% of all
land in Ireland had been transferred to a new ruling class.
This new protestant ascendancy was underpinned by the Penal
Laws that restricted the civil rights of Catholics, Presbyterians
and other religious dissenters (including Quakers and Baptists,
etc.). The Penal Laws acted as a disincentive among these
groups to keeping records. To the researcher, the sorry
result is that, in Ireland, the vast majority of all Catholic
and Presbyterian registers of baptisms, marriages and burials
that have survived date only from the 19th century.
Ireland's colonial past further affected the destruction
or survival of historic records through small but significant
differences between Ireland and Great Britain in how records
were made and kept. As an illustration of this, in 1914,
the British government ordered that the Census of Ireland
returns 1861 to 1891 be pulped to create paper for the war
effort. The order was given on the mistaken assumption that
census records in Ireland were collected in the exact same
way as in England, Scotland and Wales, where a second enumerator's
copy of the census returns had been made. This was not the
case in Ireland.
Poor rate of survival and lack of indexing of what has
survived has been further exasperated by a lack of funding
and lack of public interest compared to that which is apparent
in other countries. A successful digitisation project requires
a clear understanding of the sources, their scope and potential
uses. That this situation is slowly changing can be seen
by a description of some projects currently underway with
some major Irish repositories
The
Irish Genealogical Project
The Irish Genealogical project was set up to promote and
foster Irish genealogy in particular the development of
a searchable database of the main classes of Irish Genealogy
records. The main work of this project is done by more than
34 Heritage centres (many of whom are members of the Irish
Family History Foundation) around the country. Each centre
has concentrated on indexing records relevant to its local
district including: parish registers, civil and census records,
Griffith’s Valuation and the Tithe Applotment books.
The initial target for the project was 26 million records;
by 2003, 17 million had been indexed.
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Griffith's Valuation, National Library
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The project has received a certain amount of state funding;
financial support is however, an ongoing issue of concern
for the centres and the progress of the project. The project
is managed and marketed through Irish Genealogy Ltd. (IGL)
www.irishgenealogy.ie.
The future plans for the project are to develop a database
of all the records indexed by the local heritage centres,
which will be available in a pay-per-view basis. This service
was launched in November 2007; to date, the records of eleven
centres are online at
www.irish-roots.net
The General
Registry Office
The General Registry Office (GRO) is the repository for
all civil registrations of birth, deaths and marriages from
1864 (and non-catholic marriages from 1845). A major project
to digitise these records began in 1995 partly in response
to opposition to the move of the GRO out of Dublin to Co.
Roscommon and to concerns about access to the GRO records.
Initially, the project used a process of scanning and optical
character recognition (OCR) to capture the printed indexes.
In 2001, they abandoned this approach in favour of re-keying
of indexes (but ignoring handwritten annotations). The current
state of the project is that all births have been digitised
and validated, marriages are complete back to 1920 and deaths
back to 1924. Everything else has been indexed but not validated;
it is probably 90% completed.
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Marriage Certificate, GRO
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It is
not clear how the project will be delivered; most
likely it will be on a pay-per-view basis. The date
of delivery is also uncertain, as the GRO’s
staffing levels have not been kept sufficiently strong
to enable them to complete this project, while fulfilling
their normal day-to-day responsibilities. It could
be finished at any time in the next number of years,
2008/09/10.
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The National
Archives
The National Archives of Ireland holds a number of records
of interest to the genealogical researcher, in particular
the only two complete Irish censuses available to the public,
1901 and 1911, and the Tithe Applotment Books (a country-wide
set of land records dating from the 1820s). The National
Archives is fully committed to the principle of free availability
of its holdings and will pursue a non- commercial model
in its digitisation programme.
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1901 Census, National Archives
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Tithe Applotment Books, National Archives
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The main goal of the National Archives’ digitisation
programme at present is to put online and for free the Irish
Census for 1901 and 1911. The project, funded by the Irish
government, is being carried out in partnership with the
National Archives of Canada. It is estimated that the project
will take three years to complete. The first instalment
of Dublin 1911 went online in November 2007 and can be viewed
at www.census.nationalarchives.ie
The only other digitisation project at the National Archives
was the CD Rom Counties in Time, developed and published
by Eneclann Ltd. in 2003. Counties in Time introduces and
explores the different classes of records held by the National
Archives which are relevant to each of the 32 counties of
Ireland. It comprises a history of each county, timelines
of historical events, glossaries of terms, a sample of over
1,000 documents with a digitised copy and a transcription.
The CD is available through Eneclann at www.eneclann.ie
Public
Record Office of Northern Ireland
The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) comes
under the auspices of the Department of Culture Arts and
Leisure within the Northern Ireland Civil Service and, as
such, has access to a whole different range of funding and
partnership opportunities. PRONI has a number of digitised
resources of interest to the genealogical researcher available
through its web site www.proni.gov.uk
The Ulster Covenant (1912) archive, with nearly half a
million names, and the Freeholders Records (1727-1840) (5,500
sheets) are collections held by PRONI which have been digitised
and indexed and are available on the PRONI website. These
online archives are fully searchable and have links to digitised
images of the original documents.
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Ulster Covenant and Declaration, 1912, PRONI
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A project to index and digitise 1858 - c1900 wills from
the District Probate Registries of Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry
is almost complete. Phase one, an Index to the calendar
of Wills (grants of probate and letters of administration),
is now available on the PRONI website. Phase two, to link
the will calendar entries to the digitised images of the
wills, will follow shortly.
The Act of Union site, a public access point for the digitised
resources concerning the Act of Union, is a joint venture
by a number of Northern Ireland bodies including PRONI,
Queens University, and the Ulster Museum; the project has
UK Lottery funding and can be viewed at www.actofunion.ie
National
Library of Ireland
The National Library of Ireland (NLI), in partnership with
Eneclann & Origins.net, completed a project in 2003
to digitise all surviving Griffith Valuation Books to create
the definitive version of this resource. The project involved
the digitisation and indexing of 300 valuation books dating
from 1847 to 1852 and is available through www.irishorigins.com.
This project to digitise Griffith’s Valuation remains
the only major Irish Genealogical resource that has complete
coverage for the entire island of Ireland; it is fully online.
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Griffith's Valuation, National Library
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Grifith's Valuation online, irishorigins.com
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The NLI has other digitisation projects planned, including
the digitisation of substantial sections of the NLI visual
collections and the production of a digital version of the
source material used to create two key reference works for
Irish studies, Richard Hayes’ Manuscript Sources for
the History of Irish Civilization and Sources for the History
of Irish Civilisation: Articles in Irish Periodicals.
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Office
Cancelled Volume, Valuation Office
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The Cancelled Volumes c.1850-c1920 are the manuscript
revisions of Griffith's Valuations held in the Valuation
Office; they are a rich resource for Irish family
history. In 2004, the Valuation Office and Eneclann
carried out a pilot project on the indexation and
digitisation of this resource. The Pilot project focused
on Bansha District Electoral District (DED) in Tipperary
South. The Bansha DED involved 5,500 entries between
1864 and 1920. The full project for all of the Cancelled
Books runs to 3,000 DEDs or 15 million entries. As
with all of these projects, the main problem is securing
the required funding. In 2007, a contract was awarded
to digitally image two of the 32 counties; it remains
to be seen when or if the full project is ever completed.
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Ordnace
Survey of Ireland
One area of historical record where Ireland is unsurpassed
by any other country is in the area of its historic
mapping. Between 1829 and 1842, the Ordnance Survey
of Ireland (OSI) completed the first ever large-scale
survey of an entire country. This and later series
of historic maps, originally drawn up to facilitate
the accurate valuation of the country, provide today’s
family history researchers with a rich source of information.
The OSI has completed a major project to digitise
its historic map collection dating from 1829 up as
far as 1913, including the 1837-42: 1st edition 6”
in black/white and full colour and the later 1888-1913:
1st edition 25” maps. The service went online
in 2006 and can be accessed at www.irishhistoricmaps.ie
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Irish Public
Libraries
Every local authority in Ireland has a library network.
Many of them are making a serious effort to digitise local
resources to be available online for free. The pace of this
digitisation programme has increased dramatically over the
last two years. For example, Clare Library digitised hundreds
of local sources, including directories, census records,
Primary Valuations, etc. These can be found on www.clarelibrary.ie.
A web site for the Dublin area launched in 2007 contains
all the Dublin Heritage Group databases of Baptisms 1728-1901,
Marriages 1732-1900 and Burials 1724-1900. The full version
of this site is available free at the Dublin City Gilbert
Library on Pearse Street; there is a limited version available
online at www.dublinheritage.ie.
The network of local libraries can be found on the Library
Council web site www.librarycouncil.ie
The Library Council also set up a web portal called Ask
About Ireland, www.askaboutireland.ie
to act as a source of information about Ireland with links
to different resources. The Irish Times Digital Archive
is available through this site. There are plans to make
the Eneclann/NLI version of Griffith’s Valuation available
soon. Both of these resources will be available free to
schools and public libraries through the Ask About Ireland
web site.
The Irish Times Digital Archive, launched in 2007, contains
every page of The Irish Times published since the newspaper's
foundation almost 150 years ago. This digitisation project
was co-funded by the Library Council (Department of the
Environment, Heritage and Local Government,) and The Irish
Times Trust. The digital archive is also available on a
fee basis through www.ireland.com.
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Registry of Deeds
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The Registry of Deeds was founded
in 1707 to provide a system of voluntary registration
for deeds and conveyances affecting land. The Registry
contains 600,000 deeds to 1830 and a further 1.5
million from 1830-1929. The Registry appears to
have secured provisional approval for a €21million
project to digitise their records.
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Eneclann
Eneclann is Ireland’s leading electronic publisher
of heritage and historical data publishing on both
CD-Rom and online (with www.irishorigins.com).
The company has two publishing imprints, Eneclann
and Archive CD Books. The Eneclann catalogue emphasises
primary source material for Irish history and genealogy
while the Archive CD Books catalogue consists mainly
of digitised versions of historical and rare books
of Irish Interest, many of these books are from the
Trinity College Dublin Library. |
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The Eneclann catalogue includes titles such as: The Index
of Irish Wills 1484-1858, Grenham’s Irish Surnames,
Counties in Time, The Irish Ancestor 1969-86, Ireland’s
Memorials Records 1914-1918, The Irish Genealogist, Vols.
1-8, 1937-93, Brian J. Cantwell’s Memorials of the
Dead The Collected Works, Sinn Fein and Republican Suspects
1899-1921.
Eneclann continues to expand its list of titles while maintaining
commitment to increasing access to rare and valuable sources
of historical data. Future publishing plans include:
· Journal of the Association for
the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland,
1888-1924, 13 vols (circa 16,000 pages)
· Royal Hospital Donnybrook Records
c.1740-1900
· Catholic Qualification Rolls 1775-1801
(30,000)
· The Loyalist Petition 1848 (80,000)
· Petition for the Repeal of the
Union 1848 (250,000)
· Militia and Yeomanry Records 1750-1850
· Irish Jewish Records 1820-1960
The Archive CD Books catalogue has in excess of 120 titles
and includes directories, county and general histories,
indexes, family histories, genealogies, and statistical
reports. Both Eneclann and Archive CD Books titles can be
found at Eneclann
Publications.
The Future of Digitisation
in Ireland
Publishers rely on prior digitisation or indexation of some
sort in order to publish. There is too little of this in
Ireland. The future of Irish digitisation goes hand-in-hand
with basic archival indexing and listing; yet many of the
main records for genealogical research in Ireland have not
been listed or indexed. Some examples from major sources
include:
The National Archives
Land Records – Tithe Applotment Books, Estate Books,
Field and House Books
State Papers – Chancery Pleadings
Court & Legal Records – Outrage Papers, Petty
Sessions, Convict Reference files,
Relief Commission Papers
The National Archives of England and Wales
The National Archives Kew contains a vast amount of material
concerning Ireland that is potentially of interest to the
Irish family history researcher. For example, there is the
Irish Reproductive Loan Fund (T91) founded in 1822 and covering
the areas of Counties Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Limerick,
Cork and Sligo.
Other repositories with collections of interest to the
Irish genealogist include the National Library,
the Representative Church Body Library, University College
Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, Local Authority Archives
and Libraries.
Irish Family history researchers have traditionally worked
very hard to get around the significant gaps in the records
left by the many archival disasters in Irish history. Digitisation
of the many and varied sources such as those in this article
offers great hope to Irish genealogists wishing to take
their research further.
originally published in The
Septs,Volume 29 Number 2, April
2008.
Brian Donovan, CEO Eneclann Ltd.
Fiona Fitzsimons, APGI, Director Research Eneclann Ltd,
Cathy McCartney, Eneclann Ltd.
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