Almost every genealogist with Irish ancestors eventually discovers that centuries of the Public Record Office of Ireland’s historical records were destroyed by fire at Dublin’s Four Courts at the beginning of the Irish Civil War on June 30, 1922. It was a tremendous cultural loss.
For those of us with Irish in our DNA, now there is hope.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar yesterday announced €2.5 million (CDN$3.6 million) in government funding for a research project led by Trinity College Dublin that will digitally recreate the records destroyed in the fire.
The Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury research project is an all-island and international collaborative project. It seeks to re-imagine and re-create, through virtual reality, the archival collections that were lost, comprising records of seven centuries of Irish history, genealogy and administration.
This is the first time that the project’s five core archival partners — the National Archives of Ireland, The National Archives UK, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and the Library of Trinity College Dublin — have formally collaborated on a shared enterprise.
The Beyond 2022 team is working to assemble a complete inventory of loss and survival of the 1922 fire. In doing so, the team has identified ten main categories of surviving or substitute sources:
- Survivors: records that survived almost unscathed because they were held in the Reading Room of the Public Record Office, not the Record Treasury itself
- Salved records: records damaged by the fire, but not completely destroyed, now in varying states of conservation
- Duplicates of original records now held in partner archives
- Facsimile images made before 1922
- Antiquarian transcripts
- Printed editions
- Certified copies
- Published calendars summarizing the contents of the records
- Unpublished calendars in manuscript form
- Legal abstracts
Searchable database
Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury will gather into a single database all the information it can about these substitute sources from archives and libraries in Ireland and internationally.
The entire archive will be fully searchable, with its contents ranging from basic descriptions to fully restored records, ranging in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries
Speaking about the project, Mr. Varadkar said, “It restores a significant missing chapter in our history, which was believed to be irretrievably lost, with the recreation of seven centuries of historical, genealogical and administrative records to enable a new understanding of Ireland’s shared past.”
The first phase of the research project funded by the Irish Research Council was led by historian Dr. Peter Crooks, and computer scientist the late Dr Séamus Lawless of ADAPT, the SFI-funded Research Centre. It identified over 200 volumes of transcripts suitable for enhanced digitization, now scattered between archives in the United States, the United Kingdom and archives on the island of Ireland. These handwritten records contain more than 25 million words from documents destroyed in 1922.
The primary outcome from Phase II will be a fully immersive, three-dimensional, virtual reality model of the digitally reconstructed Public Record Office of Ireland, which will be launched in June 2022 to mark the centenary of the fire. This model will be used as an interactive tool for engagement and research, whereby visitors will be able to browse the virtual shelves and link to substitute or salvaged records held by archives and libraries around the world.
“The Four Courts blaze of 1922 was a national tragedy, but thankfully all is not lost,” said Dr. Crooks. “The scale of copies and duplicates we have identified in other archives is astounding.
“We are already working with over 35 libraries and archives in Ireland, the UK and US. And this is only the beginning.”
Trinity College Dublin’s Beyond 2022 website holds more information on the porject.
