Susan Hood - Irish Estate Paper Records as Sources

[Paddy Casey]

An excellent lecture entitled “Irish Estate Paper Records as Sources for Ancestral Research” was given at the 2006 Boston meeting of the Federation of Genealogical Societies by Susan Hood. The audio file can be purchased at http://www.lulu.com/content/405102 .

The content is highly relevant to those searching for their Clare ancestors. Those ancestors may have been connected to an estate, e.g. as employees, leaseholders, suppliers of goods, or legal adversaries in the context of an agrarian dispute, and thereby appear in the estate records.

Susan Hood has kindly sent me the syllabus notes of her lecture and I am posting them below so that they can be read when listening to the audio file.

Paddy

Irish estate paper records as sources for ancestral research

Dr Susan Hood,
Church of Ireland Representative Body Library, Dublin, Ireland,
Braemor Park, Churchtown, Dublin 14
susan.hood@rcbdub.org
Tel: 00-353-1-4923979

1.Location of estate records:

Major public repositories in Ireland – National Archives (NAI, formerly PROI and SPO) http://www.nationalarchives.ie National Library (NLI) including the Genealogical Office (GO) http://www.nli.ie Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) http://proni.nics.gov.uk Trinity College Dublin MSS Department (TCD) Representative Church Body Library, Dublin (RCB) http://www.ireland.anglican.org

Public repositories in the UK – National Archives; Scottish Records Office; county record offices. Good access to these provided by National Register of Archives interactive finding aid [see section three below for website]

Private collections – e.g. Strokestown House, County Roscommon; Birr Castle, County Offaly. Many lists for these provided in the National Library of Ireland Manuscripts Reading Room and in PRONI

2.Sources for identifying the name of the landlord relevant to area of research:

General Valuation of Rateable Property in Ireland (Dublin, 1849-64), commonly known as “Griffith’s Valuation”. Allows you to identify landlords and immediate lessors in every parish and townland from the mid-19th century. Griffith’s Valuation is now available online only on the Eneclann Ltd./Archive CD Books Ireland web service at http://www.irishorigins.com A subscription service: users can sign up for as little as a day, week, month, year is readily available. The resource, which is huge comprises 1.4 million names and over 35,000 images.

The Estate Indexing Project is an invaluable guide to the estate collections of some 15 separate counties, in NLI and NAI, for the “pre-Griffith’s Valuation period” (i.e. prior to the mid-19th century). Provides an overview of civil parishes in each county, an alphabetical listing of townlands and describes coverage of records for each one. Useful because it covers 17th and 18th centuries and includes smaller collections and an alphabetical landlord list.

U.H. Hussey de Burgh, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland: An Alphabetical List of the Owners of Estates of 500 Acres of £500 Valuation and Upwards, in Ireland (Dublin, 1881) & John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (Reprinted, Leicester, 1971) - both give background about the landlord, and where they owned property.

Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 2 volumes (London, 1837) known as “Lewis”, consists of an extensive survey of individuals parishes, towns and villages organised alphabetically. Gives the names of the minor as well as major landowners in an area.

Additional to “Lewis” is the three-volume Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland (Dublin, 1846) which accounts for landlord changes, developments in particular areas and worth comparing to “Lewis”, although “Lewis” is more comprehensive.

Also worth looking at directories such as Thom’s Almanac and Official Directory of the United Kingdom and Ireland, available annually from 1845 onwards, and for earlier periods Pigot’s City of Dublin and Hibernian Provincial Directory and Slater’s National Commercial Directory of Ireland. There are sections about prominent families in each area. A useful insight to provincial directories is which lists all Dublin and provincial directories in chronological order, is provided by Rosemary ffolliot and Donal Begley’s ‘Guide to Irish directories’ in D. F. Begley, Irish Genealogy: A Record Finder (Dublin, 1981), pp. 75-106.

Statistical surveys of individual counties were published by the Royal Dublin Society during the early 19th century. These contain vast information on the topographical, social and economic life of specific places. Not all counties are covered but good examples are James McParland’s Statistical Survey of County Mayo with Observations on Means of Improvement (Dublin, 1802) and Isaac Weld’s Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon (Dublin, 1832). The following counties are not covered by this source: Carlow, Fermanagh, Limerick, Kerry, Westmeath, Louth, Longford and Waterford.


The National Register of Archives, London, provides an interactive database list of collections in repositories throughout the UK – again both by person surname; place-name – its interactive website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/ a vital source for estate record information. Searchable under corporate name (for business etc) and also personal name and less useful placename.

For a comprehensive guide to newspapers of national and local significance and where to consult them, see Newsplan: Resport of the newsplan project in Ireland (Revised edition, Dublin and London, 1998).

3.Having found the landlord name(s), sources to direct you to collections of relevance are as follows:-

Richard Hayes Manuscript Sources for the Study of Irish Civilization (Boston, Massachusetts 1966 and seq.), and its various supplements (printed and unpublished lists in the various repositories) contain alphabetical lists of collections by estate / place name; and also surname of the landlord. Covers collections in the NAI (formerly PROI and SPO); NLI; GO; PRONI: TCD; Registry of Deeds, Dublin; British Library, London and Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Additional indices and catalogues are available for consultation in the reading rooms of the main repositories will bring information about recent accessions up to date (e.g. the National Library has a card catalogue and a computer database. News of recent accessions are usually posted on repository websites and on request.


The Ainsworth Guides to Sources in Private Collections, available on the open shelves in the Manuscripts Reading Room of the National Library (red volumes) were made in the 1940s and 1950s – still may be the only comprehensive lists for material later transferred from local custody to the Library.

4.Principal Categories of Records in Estate Paper Collections and the information they contain:

Accounts (household, expenditure, building, farmyard) – may include the names of employees, tradesmen, other local people.
Correspondence / letter books – often contain descriptive references to individuals. Require much trawling.
Rentals / rent books – record the rent paid by larger tenants (middlemen), location of arms / property
Maps, plans, surveys – give the location of individual properties / tenants’ names
Leases, lease calendars – include the names, terms of tenure, landlord-tenant relationships

5.Miscellaneous & Less Common Categories of Records in Estate Paper Collections and the information they contain:

Estate census / lists of tenants – provide locational information of named tenants and sometimes the members of their families
Labor returns – outline the nature of work carried out by estate employees, wages they were paid, hours of labor
Personal diaries, journals, reports and notebooks of landlords and their agents – provide descriptive references of individuals, works carried out, living conditions
Emigration records – provide names and details of people and their families who sought emigration assistance
Eviction records / ejectment orders – include the names and details of individuals, often the reasons why they were evicted, and dates when this occurred.
Scrapbooks – newspaper cuttings – contain miscellaneous ephemera, sometimes passing references to individuals who lived or worked on an estate
Drawings, photographs – if they survive are invaluable sources for the conditions under which people lived

6.Further reading:
John Grenham Tracing your Irish Ancestors (Dublin, 1994) carries a useful summary of how to use estate records for genealogical purposes. John is also the designer of the Estate Records Indexing Project.

Terrence Dooley, Sources for the History of Landed Estates in Ireland (Dublin, Portland OR, 2000) is the best comprehensive guides to estate sources

Susan Hood ‘ Sources for the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century estate towns in Ireland’ in Aspects of Irish Genealogy 1 (edited by M.D. Evans and Eileen Ó Dúill, Dublin, 1991), pp. 150-61, provides additional background on sources for town tenants.

W.E. Vaughan, Landlords and tenants in mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994) provides essential contextual information and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

The county by county “History and Society” series published by Geography Publications, Dublin, over the last ten years include academic essays on a range of local history topics, many of which make extensive use of estate records in individual counties.

[smcarberry]

Paddy, what a very fine thing you have done. Not only is this an incredibly fast follow-up to my original posting on this subject, but now you have laid out in full exactly what we need to embark on serious estate research. Also
I can add those books to my list which I publicize among family historians.
This may well have ripples for years to come. The next question is: Does the Clare Library have these materials, so that there is a handy location at which to read up on sources and plan research trips to get to primary materials ?

Then, how on earth did you import onto this site the full syllabus ? I can't imagine that you typed it. If you did, you not only are a superb typist but a very generous soul indeed.

Sharon C.

[Paddy Casey]

This is an interesting one, Sharon. There are lots of people (e.g. listers) who are planning a trip to Clare and want to do a bit of ancestral research and ask how to go about it. It would be fun to put together a little vade mecum for them to use when preparing their trip and see whether the Clare Library would like to post it on their site.

The task would not be trivial. Some of the travellers in spe will be well up on their family histories whilst others might be at the bottom (=clueless) end of the learning curve. It would have to steer clear of the "teaching granny to suck eggs" mode, should not be a primer on genealogical research in Ireland, of which there are several, and should be focussed on Clare. It should cover things like research facilities in Clare, locating your townland in Clare, identifying people you need to meet in Clare, equipment you will need (camera, sound recorder, wellington boots for tramping the cemeteries and fields, etc.), swinging by Dublin to browse the NAI and NLI facilities, planning expectations (e.g. don't expect to achieve a lot if you only have 3 days in Clare and want to combine sightseeing with research).

The task could be carved up among a bunch of us (e.g. especially including indigenous Clare experts) and might include contributions from, for example, a parish priest (re. expectations as to what they can provide or have time to provide).
Let's give this some thought. Have to go out now.

Paddy