Irish Land Commission's Keane Index cards now online

Something I only discovered tbis week is that the catalogue cards from the Keane Index from 1891-1909 are now available to view via the National Library of Ireland's catalogue at https://catalogue.nli.ie/Collection/vtls000923169?recordID=vtls000929125, thanks to the efforts of the library and the Irish Manuscript Commission.

The Keane Index provides the only current means to identify information held within the records of the Irish Land Commission, which the Irish Government has stubbornly locked away in a warehouse in Portlaoise, where they currently remain out of the reach of researchers. The Land Commission papers details the acquisition of lands by the general public from the landed gentry after the collapse of the landed estates system following An Gorta Mór from 1845-1851. Amongst the papers are deeds, wills, and other extraordinarily useful records for family history purposes. 

The Keane Index comprises of 36,000 cards, that leads to information about properties contained within 35 bound volumes, all at about 400 pages each. The index allows researchers to search by county, estate, or individual name.

You can read more about the partnership with the NLI and IMC at https://www.nli.ie/news-stories/stories/tracing-irelands-land-history-digitisation-keane-index.

And maybe, one day, when the Irish Government wakes up on this, we'll get to see the actual Land Commission records themselves (many for the north after Partition are already accessible at PRONI)... 

** For more on the Irish Land Commission, see my book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, available from Pen and Sword in the UK at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Ancestors-Through-Land-Records-Paperback/p/19283 and the USA via https://www.penandswordbooks.com/9781526780218/tracing-your-irish-ancestors-through-land-records/.

Chris

Order Researching Ancestral Crisis in Ireland in the UK at https://bit.ly/4jJWSEh. Also available -Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. To purchase in the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page.

TheGenealogist releases Roman Catholic parish records indexes for County Laois

From TheGenealogist (www.thegenealogist.co.uk):

Over Half a Million Irish Parish Records newly released by TheGenealogist

Another whole county’s worth of Irish parish records now bolsters the record collections of TheGenealogist! Today, one of the leading providers of family history resources has added the records of 510,007 individuals from County Laois to its site in their latest release.

County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922, is a double landlocked county in the Eastern and Midland Region of the Republic of Ireland. As the Irish diaspora has spread out across the globe, especially during the terrible events of the Great Famine of 1845–49 which devastated the county at the time, many people from across the world will be able to trace their roots back to this part of Ireland.

Searching TheGenealogist’s transcriptions provides an easy way to find records which then provides a handy link to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in order to see the digitised image of the actual register. TheGenealogist’s transcription greatly benefits from its powerful SmartSearch that can be used to identify possible siblings, as well as parent’s potential marriage details.

To find out more about how to use these records see TheGenealogist’s article: Searching for ancestors in the Laois parish records at https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/searching-for-ancestors-in-the-laois-parish-records-5099/

Comment: These are Roman Catholic records indexes for Laois, from the records held at the national Library of Ireland's platform at https://registers.nli.ie/. 

(With thanks to Nick Thorne)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For purchase in tthe USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, on Threads at @scottishgenesblog and via Mastodon at https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGENES.

National Library of Ireland's Big Houses in Ireland online exhibition

The National Library of Ireland is hosting an online exhibition entitled Power & Privilege: the Big House in Ireland. From the site:

Ireland's “Big Houses” were the large country homes of local landlords. Most of them were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and were usually surrounded by large estates. Tenants on the estate rented the land from their landlords.

These photographs, collected by the National Library of Ireland, capture scenes from life in the Big Houses before this way of life disappeared. The period they capture looks peaceful and prosperous, but by the 1920s the landlord system in Ireland had been dismantled. Without their large estates, combined with the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, few families could afford the upkeep of these homes, and the era of the “Big House” ended.

You can access the exhibition at https://artsandculture.google.com/story/9wWhhV1p6BkA8A 

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For purchase in tthe USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, on Threads at @scottishgenesblog and via Mastodon at https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGENES.

FamilySearch adds Irish Catholic parish records index

I'm slightly belated in reporting this, but FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) has added the following indexed Irish collection:

Ireland, Catholic Parish Registers, 1740-1900
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2820100

Catholic church parish registers from Ireland, containing baptism, marriages, and deaths that took place in Ireland and Northern Ireland from 1740-1900. Records may include: name, parents, spouse, father's occupation, residence, date of birth, date of marriage, burial date, and much more depending on the record type. This collection also contains a small amount of confirmations, dispensations, and funeral records. The content varies by location and date. The original records are held at the National Library of Ireland.

Having another index is useful, although it is a pity the images are not linked. The collection is also freely indexed on both Ancestry and FindmyPast, which, unlike FamilySearch, does have access to the NLS images, although I have found that their indexes have missed a few folk in the past. 

The original collection is also freely available from the NLI, in browse only format, at https://registers.nli.ie.  

(With thanks to Thomas MacEntee via @genealogybargains on Threads)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

National Library of Ireland launches redesigned website

The National Library of Ireland has given its website a complete overhaul, which means you'll need to reoirentate yourself on how to navigate the site. As with the National Archives of Ireland site's recent redevelopment, it clearly seems to be a case of having resdesigned the website with a tablet and phone market in mind, there are lots of overly large images and text, with more scrolling now involved on the front pages ("Mobile responsiveness: In order to better cater to the needs and wishes of our visitors, the website is fully tailored to browsing on desktop and mobile devices" - sigh!). However, it does now look more modern, and the whole site is now fully bililingual between English and Irish (Gaeilge).

Here are some quick steers on the layout:

The main website is accessed at https://www.nli.ie.

The Catalogues page is accessible at https://www.nli.ie/collections/using-our-collections/search-help, and the Sources catalogue (for post-1990 catalogued manuscripts) is still independently accessible via http://sources.nli.ie. As before, the main catalogue also includes digitised materials, and is relatively straightforward to use. 

General Collections are described at https://www.nli.ie/collections, with digital collections acessible at https://www.nli.ie/collections/our-collections/newspapers.

One of the most useful resources on the previous version of the site was its Newsplan Project and database and Newspaper catalogue. It now looks like these need to be accessed in a different way, via https://www.nli.ie/collections/our-collections/newspapers. To search for a newspaper in an area, type in the name of the area, do the search, then filter down using the 'Newspapers' tag found under 'Narrow Search' to the right of screen. Titles from a particular area will then be presented as a series of catalogued entries, with accession information. At the end of an entry for a particular newspaper is a link marked 'Get more information: Newsplan: Report of the Newsplan Project in Ireland. Revised edition (1998)', which then takes you to a digitised version of the report from 1998, rather than just a database search for other titles in an area. You can also access the report directly at https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000042992. This is a bit of a pain in the neck, to be honest, but at least the information is still accessible. 

The Family History section of the site is at https://www.nli.ie/family-history. The Getting Started section at https://www.nli.ie/family-history/getting-started offers free chart and worksheet template, but the info on useful genealogy collections is sourced from the Further Research section at https://www.nli.ie/family-history/further-research, covering various topics from Civil Records (very nicely including a link to GRONI in the north!) to Military Records.

A useful list of eResources is also available at https://www.nli.ie/collections/our-collections/e-resources.

Overall, it's not too much of a revolution, it's just that the text and pics are all now MUCH BIGGER IF YOU'RE ON A PC!!!! The change to access the newspaper information is a bit unfortunate, but we'll survive...! 

A press release on the launch is available at https://www.nli.ie/news-stories/news/nli-launches-new-website

(With thanks to Claire Bradley via Twitter at @cbgenealogy)

Chris

Pre-order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Kildare Catholic records and Irish Tithe Defaulters added to TheGenealogist

Fom TheGenealogist (www.thegenealogist.co.uk):

TheGenealogist adds 1831 Irish Tithe Defaulters and more Irish Parish Registers

TheGenealogist has today released 371,400 Kildare Catholic Parish Registers covering 323,923 records of baptisms, 46,914 marriages and 563 burials to make it easier for its Diamond subscribers to discover their Irish ancestors from this eastern part of Ireland.

Also released at this time are more than 29,000 individuals recorded as Irish Tithe Defaulters. These records from 1831 can be a useful stand-in for the 1831 Irish census which was almost completely destroyed in 1922.

Tithes were levied on all occupiers of agricultural land, no matter what their religion was and the Roman Catholic population of Ireland particularly resented paying these tithes to the Church of Ireland (the Established Church) on top of often supporting their own priests. Refusal to pay the tithes came to a head in the years 1831 to 1832, beginning what is known as the ‘Tithe War’ in Ireland.

To alleviate the Church of Ireland’s shortfall The Clergy Relief Fund was established in 1832 by the Recovery of Tithes (Ireland) Act 1832. This provided the affected clergy compensation in return for providing the government with the names of the defaulters.

Many of the non-payers named were ordinary folk such as labourers, farmers and widows who would most likely have been Roman Catholics and so not part of the congregation at their local Church of Ireland parish church, but surprisingly there are also Magistrates, Peers of the Realm and even Knights.

These new releases, now available to all Gold and Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist will be a welcome resource for those family historians wanting to research their Irish ancestry.

Read TheGenealogist’s featured article: Can’t Pay or Won’t Pay – The Tithe Defaulters https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/cant-pay-or-wont-pay--the-tithe-defaulters-1651/

Update: The Kildare records are hosted on the NLI's site at https://registers.nli.ie/, with links to that site for entries found in the collection. I've just checked with TheGenealogist, and this is a separately created index to that hosted on Ancestry and FindmyPast, which I've never been a great fan of (they were produced very quickly), so a very useful addition indeed.

(With thanks to Nick Thorne)

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Irish Land Commission records to be made accessible

In my new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, I discuss the creation of the Irish Land Commission from 1881, its early remits, how it subsequently evolved (including beyond Partition, through which it was divided into two agencies, north and south), and how it was finally wound up, both north and south of the border. From my book:

In 1879 the Land War then exploded in Ireland, with the main issues being how to address the parasitical nature of landlordism, with demands for fair rent, better security of tenure, and an improved right to buy. In response, the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 was passed by the British Government, establishing a new Irish Land Commission, which initially sought to intervene in the rents issue, but which also assumed the work of the Landed Estates courts. The Commission soon also took on the role of a tenancy purchasing commission, assisting those wishing to buy their holdings outright with loans to be repaid over 35 years at 5% interest, and granting tenants vesting orders for their new holdings, essentially title deeds in their name, clear of any previous burdens or encumbrances. The scheme was further extended with the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act in 1885, which extended loans repayments to over 49 years, and again in 1889.

For family historians, the potential of the records for land based research is immense, in that they document in great detail the history of ownership for great swathes of the island of Ireland. There is just one slight problem - until now, the records for the Republic of Ireland have not been made available for access to the public.

I say the Republic of Ireland particularly, because this is one of those areas where Partition actually ended up as a benefit for those living in Northern Ireland, with the records for the north transferred to PRONI, and which have long been available to consult. In my book I discuss how to gain access to the northern records (there is a bit of a learning curve!), but also the indexed all-island survey of the records from 1881-1909 by Edward Keane held at the National Library of Ireland, which testify to the existence of many records in the south. The records themselves are sadly languishing in a warehouse in Portlaoise, with the authorities having been deaf to the cries of academics and historians alike for decades.  

Well now, at long last, some good news. An article in the Irish Times at https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/treasure-trove-includes-record-for-almost-all-land-in-ireland-1.4762067 discusses plans to finally digitise some 200 'search aids' to the records:

The search aids are made up of thousands of pages on court approvals for land purchase agreements, loan advances and repayments, and migrant books detailing how people moved from one area to another to take up land. They are a critical guide for finding individual documents among the 35,000 separate sets of records, some of which comprise dozens of boxes, in the maze-like archive.

The project to digitise the Land Commission archive will take years to complete, but this is a welcome - and very LONG overdue - development for those carrying out Irish land research.

In the meantime, you can find out more about the background to the records - and how to access the records in the north in particular - in my book, which is currently on offer at Pen and Sword for £12 plus p&p at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Ancestors-Through-Land-Records-Paperback/p/19283

(Please note: if living in the Republic of Ireland, you may find it cheaper to purchase a copy from the Ulster Historical Foundation at https://www.booksireland.org.uk/store/all-departments/land-records, as the post-Brexit postage costs to Ireland from England are a bit ludicrous just now; the UHF postage costs are currently cheaper)

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

National Library of Ireland updates catalogues interface

From the National Library of Ireland (www.nli.ie)

We are delighted to announce that we have updated the interface of the National Library of Ireland's online catalogue!  You can explore it here: https://catalogue.nli.ie

Have fun!

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.