Researchers at Maynooth University in County Kildare, Ireland have launched an online archive of letters written between late 1915 and late 1916.
The Letters of 1916 project has crowdsourced letters and their transcriptions from memory institutions and members of the public in Ireland’s first public humanities project.
According to the Irish Independent newspaper, “Letters written between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916 were digitised to create this unique collection which will be of great interest not only to historians and genealogists, but anybody who wants to find out what people were writing in Ireland, as well as how people outside of Ireland viewed events here.”
Project leader, Professor Susan Schreibman, said, “Letters of 1916 has created a crowdsourced digital collection of thousands of letters connecting hundreds of lives. These letters cover a variety of topics ranging from the Easter Rising to art, culture, family life and the Great War.”
So far, Letters of 1916 has collected more than 2,500 letters.
You can read more about the project in the Independent article, and you can start searching the online archive on the Letters of 1916 website. The search function works well, but I prefer the browsing feature, perhaps because none of my ancestral surnames appeared in the search results.
