Landed Estates database (September 2008 version)

[Paddy Casey]

The latest (September 2008) version of the Landed Estates database at http://www.landedestates.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/index.jsp contains a large number of Clare records and is well worth a browse*. It contains substantial chunks of information on the families who owned the estates.

The Connacht Landed Estates project, funded by the Irish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences ( http://www.irchss.ie/ ), under its Thematic Projects (Research Infrastructure) Grants, undertook the research for, and the publication of, a comprehensive and integrated resource guide to landed estates and gentry houses in Connacht, c. 1700-1914. The aim of the guide is to assist and support researchers working on the social, economic, political and cultural history of Connacht from c.1700 to 1914.

The project involved the distillation and collation of data from a broad range of historical sources, and the concise codification of these data on an estate/name basis. The optimum use of the data determined that the database be published in electronic form. Full details of the sources used can be viewed under Reference Sources in the database. See the Help link for further details on the creation of the database.

The Project was hosted by the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Project Principal: Prof. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh.
Researchers: Ms. Marie Boran & Ms. Brigid Clesham.
Technical Adviser: Mr. Joe Desbonnet.

A nice feature of this database is that it includes all the data you need to find a given estate on the map, including the OS map number, the OSI grid reference, the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) and - this is really neat - a link to Google Earth (OK, OK, the Google Earth satellite imagery of County Clare is still pretty crummy in many places I'm the last to look gift horses in the mouth and those bits will surely be upgraded as time goes on).

Paddy

* I use the word "browse" deliberately. When one enters "Clare" into the Search facility it turns up a page of arcane error messages, both with the Firefox browser and with IE. Searches for specific estates seem to work. I have flagged this bug to the authors. P.

[sadhbh]

Hi Paddy,
The Landed Estates site is being expanded beyond Connaught. I believe the Clare material will be online in a year or so.
Sadhbh

[mcreed]

Paddy,
if you click on the 'Search' option on the left-hand side and then select the option 'List all houses' - you will get up a page listing all of the houses that they have listed in the database. You can then search this using your browser's own search facility, e.g. in Firefox select Edit, and Find in This Page; in Internet Explorer select Edit, Find on this Page. Searching for 'county Clare' brings up a few records.

But, if you click on the Map option you will be able to drag the map down to see that the whole of Clare does appear to have been done (at least from the viewpoint of the map). As an example 'Ballartney' in the south of the county is on the map but is not listed in the 'database' list of estates, though it is in the database itself (http://www.landedestates.ie/LandedEstat ... sp?id=1604). So there seems to be a lot of work done behind the scenes that has not been made obvious yet. The map seems to be the best avenue of exploration here.
Regards,
Mike