175,000 new historical records released to mark 103rd anniversary of Four Courts fire
The records have been released to mark the 103rd anniversary of the fire at Dublin's Four Courts that destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland, along with 700 years of Irish history.
Available to view for the first time are more than 60,000 names from the 19th century census destroyed in the 1922 fire, which occurred during the Civil War.
Compiled from transcriptions preserved in the National Archives of Ireland and the Record Office of Northern Ireland, the recovered transcripts contain details of the lives of ordinary people across Ireland in the decades around the time of the Famine.
Started three years ago, the VRTI project is led by Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.
'We are excited to release our latest collections freely online for citizen researchers, students, and the academic community. The scale, scope, and significance of these materials is remarkable,' Trinity historian Dr Peter Crooks said.
'They will be of huge interest to anyone exploring Ireland's story as a global island.
"Thousands of names of individuals from before and after the Great Famine; extensive intelligence reports from the Tudor era; and a host of medieval records presented in English alongside the original Latin parchment – these vast and varied collections are a testament to the power of collaboration.'
In the three years since it was launched, the VRTI has put together more than 350,000 records and 250 million words of searchable Irish history.
Other new additions to the VRTI include documents telling stories from the 1798 Rebellion and Irish links to the American Revolution, and five million words of Anglo-Norman Irish history from 1170 to 1500 translated into English.
'A stand-out for me is the extraordinary detective work by our research team and partners in Dublin and Belfast on the pre-Famine census returns. Millions of names were lost, tragically, in 1922 when those records went up in flames,' Dr Crooks said.
'But today, on the 103rd anniversary of the fire, we are releasing more than 60,000 names newly recovered from those very census returns.
"It's a tremendous achievement. What we have uncovered after years of painstaking archival work will help families across the world trace their story deeper into the Irish past.'
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