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Irish Times
25-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The people who gave Ireland back part of its past
The recent announcement that the Virtual Treasury project , with its mission to recover archival records lost in the fire that wrecked the Public Record Office (PRO) at the start of the Civil War in 1922, has retrieved 60,000 names from the pre-famine census records that were destroyed, garnered much national and international interest. Boldly imaginative and ambitious, this project was conceived by Dr Peter Crooks of Trinity College Dublin in 2015 and has involved great effort on the part of archivists and historians to locate material in Irish and international archives. An all-island collaborative research endeavour, it involves millions of words being 'linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections' of numerous archives, including as far away as Australia. A project supported by the State, it is a reminder of Ireland's leading role in digitising and making accessible archival sources, previously underlined by the success of the digitisation and free access to the 1901 and 1911 census returns. Crooks has maintained that the Virtual Treasury project is guided by the spirit of Herbert Wood, the deputy keeper of the PRO, which was established by the Public Record Act (Ireland) 1867. Wood saw the archival records as belonging to the public, not academics: 'The history of a country is founded upon its archives, and the preservation not only of its public but also of its private documents'. He was devastated by the incineration of the priceless records in 1922, as 'the Irish Record Office is starting again like a new country almost without a history'. The project to recover 'seven centuries of Irish history' Listen | 24:57 In 1930, Wood spoke of 'how the body of public records may be reconstructed from duplicates or copies which may be found in other repositories or which have fortunately been printed ... to the numerous literary searchers, who, for over half a century, have been seeking material for their studies in the Record Office, we must be grateful, for much of the result of their research has appeared in print, and thus copies of many a document have been preserved ... It will be a useful and interesting work for some student to wade through all the Irish antiquarian publications and note any copies of public records appearing in those publications.' READ MORE Almost a century on, that work is being embraced with gusto and it is a cultural achievement to be admired. Another relevant spirit in this context is that of Robert Dudley Edwards, UCD professor of modern Irish history from 1944 to 1979, who devoted much of his career to raising archival awareness and whose work and complex personality are uncovered in detail in a new book by his granddaughter Neasa MacErlean, Telling the Truth is Dangerous: How Robert Dudley Edwards Changed Irish History Forever . Dudley Edwards was no saint and the book underlines how he could at times be disputative, inebriated and cruel, but he was an inspiring teacher and had an exceptional sense of purpose and public service. He spent much time traversing the country building awareness of the need to preserve local and national and personal and private documents. As someone centrally involved in building the framework for the academic study of history, he emphasised the importance of proper training and methodological soundness for historians and established the archives department in UCD. [ Black Death, Newgrange and the American Revolution: a virtual trove of Irish history rediscovered Opens in new window ] He was equally aware of the importance of extending the reach of history and archives beyond the confines of the university. Exactly 50 years ago he was vocal about the need for proper archives legislation in Ireland, as in its absence 'historians will necessarily have to rely on British archives for the last word' on Irish history. The answer to his plea eventually came with the National Archives Act of 1986, implemented just before his death in 1988. It is striking how the preoccupations and central messages of both Wood and Dudley Edwards continue to resonate, especially during this era when there is, in some quarters, such a cavalier and dangerous distortion of history and contempt for evidence, and where skewed and selective accounts of the past are weaponised, with devastating results. Dudley Edwards and his generation of historians were particularly mindful of that danger given that they came to public prominence during and after the second World War. In addition, some of the Irish historians of that era who studied in Britain before returning to Ireland, were, as noted by Robert's son Owen, also a historian, 'in a state of boiling rage at the ignorance of Irish history among English historians'. Dudley Edwards was happy, however, to invite British historian Herbert Butterfield to Dublin 80 years ago to deliver a lecture. Butterfield outlined what should be the essential mission of the historian: 'seeking only to make human understanding more profound'. That task is not the preserve of the professional historian; it is relevant to anyone who takes the past seriously.
The Journal
30-06-2025
- General
- The Journal
Over 175,000 historical records lost during 1922 Four Courts explosion recovered and put online
OVER 175,000 historical records which were lost in the 1922 explosion and fire which destroyed the Public Records Office in the Four Courts have been recovered and made available online. The records have been made freely available from today to mark the 103 rd anniversary of the Public Record Office explosion , which was located in the Four Courts. The records are available on the website of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland and work to replace and digitise the more than 175,000 historical records involved more than 75 partner archives and libraries across Ireland and the word. The dome of the Four Courts on fire Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo Dr Ciarán Wallace, co-director of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, remarked that the team has found records in archives and libraries around Ireland, both north and south, and also around Britain and the world. Speaking to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Wallace said: 'Wherever Irish people went, records seem to go. 'And English administrators who'd worked here might go back to England with the records that they had accumulated in their time here as senior officers in Ireland.' Wallace explained that the work involves examining the catalogues of its 75 partners and once the team recognises a name in the collections, they ask to see the papers of those donors. 'Suddenly, up comes records that are copies made before 1922, in the days before photocopiers and scanners, when copies are made longhand. 'So these are centuries of transcriptions that have been scattered all around the globe and on we're able to bring them back into one central location.' The records also includes 60,000 names from 19th century censuses, which were previously unknown or unavailable. When asked how the census material was fashioned together, Wallace praised the work of his colleague Dr Brian Gurrin. 'Before 1922, the census exists in the Public Record Office,' explained Wallace. Advertisement 'You could hire a genealogist to go into the archive and trace up your family history by hand. 'You then go off with your family history under your arm but when the genealogist retires or dies, their notes get left into the archive. 'It's finding those notes, sometimes scrawled and scribbled, taken from the census that was then burnt in 1922.' And when asked to pick out something from the more than 175,000 historical documents that fascinated him, Wallace pointed to a document in the medieval accounts from around 1284, of records of supplies going to build a king's castle in Roscommon. He also pointed to an Irish language letter from Co Donegal penned in around 1661. 'On the road between Donegal town and Barnesmore Gap in June 1661,' said Wallace, 'the local English authorities seized a letter which was written in Gaelic script. They couldn't interpret the letter or get anybody in the locality to interpret it. 'So they thought this was highly suspicious and they sent it down to Dublin for investigation and it then gets sent over to London.' When it was translated, it turned out to be a letter by the Franciscan Order. Wallace explained: 'Oliver Cromwell is dead, the new King has come in, and Franciscans are thinking, 'maybe we can get better dispensation under the new monarch coming in'. 'Of course, the English can't read this letter and they think it's something highly suspicious. 'It ends up on an intelligence file in London, where it has sat for over 400 years and is available online our website.' Meanwhile, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland has over 350,000 historical records on its website, from medieval rolls to the pre-Famine census. 'There are portals, with one for medieval research, the 1798 Rebellion and a population portal,' said Wallace, who said that within these portals people will be able to easily search for the particular area of interest they have. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Irish Examiner
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Pioneering project releases more lost Irish records spanning 700 years
Seven centuries of lost historical records covering espionage, political corruption and the lives of ordinary people in Ireland have been recovered and are being released. A pioneering project to fill gaps in Irish history is making 175,000 more records and millions more words of searchable content freely available to researchers and members of the public. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, a global academic collaboration led by Trinity College Dublin, deployed historians, computer scientists and other specialists to digitally recreate parts of a vast archive destroyed in Ireland's civil war. The project launched in 2022 on the centenary of the burning of the Public Record Office in Dublin in a five-day battle that began on 28 June 1922. It is now marking the 103rd anniversary of the calamity by adding freshly recovered material that takes in the Anglo-Norman conquest and the 1798 rebellion and a genealogical trove from 19th-century censuses. 'It's a very significant scale of data,' said Peter Crooks, a Trinity historian and academic director of the project. HISTORY HUB If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading 'It's an enormous stretch of time from the 13th century up to the 19th century. The scale of what can be brought in, in terms of reconstruction, continues to amaze me.' Once the envy of scholars around the world, the six-storey Public Record Office at the Four Courts by the River Liffey contained priceless troves dating from medieval times. It was obliterated as troops of the fledgling Irish State battled former comrades hunkered in the building. It was long assumed that all was lost but the project enlisted 75 archives and libraries in Ireland, the UK and around the world to source transcripts and duplicates of documents, many of which had lain, forgotten, in storage. The latest troves to be catalogued and digitised bring the total to 350,000 records and 250m words of searchable Irish history. Culture minister Patrick O'Donovan said international collaboration underpinned the 'riches' that had been rediscovered. 'It offers an invaluable historical resource for people of all ages and traditions across the island of Ireland and abroad, and democratises access so that our shared history is more accessible and engaging for everyone.' The project has fused old-fashioned academic investigation, artificial intelligence and support and expertise from institutions that contain Irish records, notably the National Archives of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the UK National Archives at Kew and the Irish Manuscripts Commission. 'The circle of collaborators has widened and deepened,' said Mr Crooks. The latest material includes 60,000 names from the lost censuses, creating a data hoard for genealogists and Irish diaspora descendants, among others, to trace family lineage, says Ciarán Wallace, a Trinity historian and co-director of the project. 'This is only a fragment of what's missing but 60,000 is a huge improvement on a blank slate.' The project's 'age of conquest' portal contains parchments in Latin and 5m words of Anglo-Norman Irish history, spanning 1170 to 1500, that have been translated into English. Uploaded State papers, spanning 1660 to 1720, comprise 10m words, including extensive intelligence reports from the Tudor era when English monarchs tightened their grip on England's first colony. A diary that ended up at the US Library of Congress is now accessible and sheds light on dodgy deals that led to the abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 and Ireland's incorporation into the UK. 'You find out about some of those underhanded dealings,' said Joel Herman, a research fellow who works on the project. 'One member of parliament said he can't vote for it because of the corrupt methods that have been used to win votes.' Along with the new material, a search tool called the Knowledge Graph Explorer is being introduced that can identify people, places and the links between them. The Guardian
RTÉ News
30-06-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
'New lease of life' - Project digitises archive documents
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.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
How to fight a fascist state – what I learned from a second world war briefing for secret agents
The SOE Syllabus was a series of lectures given to prospective secret agents in Britain during the second world war. These 'lessons in ungentlemanly warfare' were released from the top secret bit of the Public Record Office (now known as the National Archive) and published as a historical curio in 2001, when my esteemed colleague John Crace picked out the sillier bits in one of his Digested Read reviews. There was a whole lecture about how to craft a disguise, in which people with sticky-out ears were advised to use glue to pin them back. But now, 24 years later, I have picked up the book with a graver purpose – just on the off-chance that if we end up having to resist a fascist state, the past might have something to offer. They won't know everything, these ungentlemanly gentlemen, being as they didn't have the internet. But they can't have known nothing. A lot of it is quite dated – struggling to comprehend the code system known as a 'playfair cipher', I realise that codebreaking technology has probably moved on in the intervening 80 years and I am making my brain ache for nothing. A section on political language, and how it should always be concrete – eg don't say 'hunger', say 'empty bellies' – felt plausible in principle but wrong on the particulars. Some of the advice serves only to underline how much more complicated the world is now – in information, in surveillance, in every way. There's a section on propaganda that describes the 'jetsam' method of distribution – dropping a provocative leaflet or letter, containing 'libels, rumours and calumnies' in some place where people will find it. It's more effective to drop a fragment than the whole thing, apparently, since it makes it feel like a quest. And it's better to drop it some place where whoever finds it will be alone, so in a train carriage at the beginning of a journey, or the cubicle of a public lavatory. Realistically, though, who would even pick up and read a calumny these days, when they have a phone? There must be some online equivalent of an empty rail carriage at the start of a journey (an empty Reddit thread?), but the printed leaflet has had its day. Nevertheless, there are some broad outlines that have not changed, and they are quite obvious, but they are also quite easily forgotten: such as, there is no point in propaganda unless it leads to an action. The action also drives home the message and makes it true, so creates a loop of authority and omnipotence around the messenger. The opposite is also true: Goebbels' anti-Italian propaganda of July 1934, I read, was worse than a waste of time because no action was taken. It made him look weak, and his point of view contestable. All of which holds for non-state – there's no point in a narrative that yields nothing concrete, no point in a protest that doesn't disrupt, no point in disruption without a plan. More than pointless, it actually undermines the cause, whatever it might be. Environmental protesters of every generation are on exactly the right track, then. They must throw soup and glue themselves to the road, because everything they do that has no palpable action attached undermines their message. As I was reading all this, six members of the 'non-violent civil resistance campaign' (their description) Youth Demand were arrested while holding a public meeting. The immediately striking thing was that the authorities entered a Quaker meeting house to make the arrests, which hasn't happened in living memory but, fair play to the Metropolitan police, did happen quite a lot in the 1660s, albeit without the tasers. But as the event settles, the more striking point is: that's quite a strange thing for a not-totalitarian state to do. It feels a bit like democracy is cosplaying its opposite just because there's authoritarianism in the air. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
