'New lease of life' - Project digitises archive documents

RTÉ News​

8 hours ago

175,000 new historical records lost during a fire at the Four Courts during the Civil War in 1922 are being made available online from today, including 60,000 names from the Irish 19th century censuses.
Since it was launched three years ago, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland has been tracking down copies of documents lost in the blaze from archives across the globe.
Seventy-five institutions in Ireland and abroad have contributed digital images of transcripts and duplicates of documents that were destroyed when the Public Record Office was burned to the ground.
The documents are now available online as part of the project led by Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.
The 60,000 names of Irish families from a number of censuses - from the 1800s - were painstakingly compiled from transcriptions of documents in the National Archives of Ireland and Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
Among them are extracts from the journals of two genealogists, who copied the censuses as part of their work.
Dr Brian Gurrin of Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, who is also a population and census specialist, said they reveal the ordinary lives of people in the decades before and after the Great Famine.
Dr Gurrin said: "When the Record Office was destroyed the personal notes of those genealogists and records agents suddenly became the only census records that were surviving or were available.
"So many of those genealogists submitted their personal notes into the Public Record Office after it was re-established after the destruction."
He said those collections have been retained in the National Archives and "they're available to the public but they're very difficult to access because they're not really catalogued in any great way".
Dr Gurrin said census information "is scattered throughout the collections", adding it "can be very difficult to access".
"So, what the Virtual Record Treasury project has been doing is going in and accessing those individual notebooks and individual pages, looking through them, trying to find census material that was transcribed and is now destroyed," he said.
"This is the first time it's all been in one place," he added.
He said the census details provide some "gems" of information about Irish lives, including the size of families, the occupations of women aswell as colourful notes of some census entries.
He said: "One genealogist, Gertrude Thrift, who transcribed many thousands of names from the census, transcribed material from Carrickmacross from Humphrey Evans who was the agent to Lord Shirley.
"He put a little note against the transcription in the original volume, which is now destroyed, but Gertrude conveniently transcribed a note for us and what it basically says is 'that Humphrey Everett when I asked him his age and the ages of his daughters, he refused to give me the information and chased me away'."
Dr Gurrin said another interesting insight comes from Philip Crossley, a genealogist.
"He notes John Morriss, who owned a hotel in Headford in Co Galway, describes his eldest son as his son and heir and in the occupation," he said.
"He puts down 'walking about', which seems to express some of the frustration that he felt at his son who wasn't pulling his weight in the business," he added.
Documents telling the story of the 1798 Rebellion, life in Anglo-Norman Ireland from the 1100s to the 1500s and State Papers from 1660 to 1720 that document the governing Ireland following Cromwell's death are now also online.
Ciarán Wallace, Deputy Director of Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, said the documents have come from all corners of the globe.
Mr Wallace said: "All the originals are lost, but these duplicate documents are from London, from Belfast, from across Ireland, north and south, from North America.
"We got records from Australia. Basically, it's like a documentary diaspora. Wherever the Irish went, the records went with them and very often, wherever the English went, Irish records went with them as well."
He said the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland now have "75 archives and libraries who share their records with us and share their expertise with us".
He added that sometimes the records are "already digitised, and other times, we can identify a record and say that's really significant, and we'll arrange to have it digitised and then bring it onto the virtual treasury".
"The Norman era papers, the Medieval era papers, some of those on the face of it, sound quite dull," he said.
"They're Exchequer records like taxation records, but in those taxation records you see people who are paying their taxes, disputing their taxes, who are paying fees and fines for inheriting land, who are writing to appeal about ownership of land," he added.
"You have women and men disputing with the Government."
Mr Wallace said when the documents move into the Cromwellian era, "the State Papers Ireland collection from the National Archives UK, we've nearly 28,000 pages of records from the collection".
"They are the view from London, looking at Ireland and trying to decide how to govern this colony and you have people again fighting over land ownership, a constant theme of Irish records and intelligence gathering of suspect people," he said.
Mr Wallace said there is "an amazing story" of a letter seized in the 1660s written in Irish and "the local government official who gets it can't understand the Irish and he tries to get it translated in the locality and nobody would translate it".
He continued: "So he's actually panicking, saying 'is this some secret code about another rebellion?'
"In fact, when they do get it translated, it is the Franciscans talking about reorganising the Franciscan Order in Ireland because Cromwell is gone.
"This letter ends up on an intelligence file in London and now it's available in Australia for people to see.
"We can look and try our hand at reading 17th century Irish."
Zoe Reid, Keeper of the National Archives of Ireland, said the project makes documents that have been sitting in archives for decades accessible to new audiences.
She said the National Archives has a collection of over 60 million records, adding "our role is to preserve, collect and maintain those records for public access".
"What's really exciting about this project is that we're bringing our archival knowledge and expertise along with the historians and their knowledge," she said.
"We're bringing the two together and we're learning more about our collections, and we're making our collections even more understandable and accessible for people, and we're bringing them to new audiences and giving them a new lease of life," she added.