Sunday 27 January 2013

Ask About Ireland - Griffith's Valuation

Free access to Griffith's Valuation, the first full scale valuation of property in Ireland. Published between 1847 and 1854.

Explore the data by family or place name.
 
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml

Trace your Irish Ancestors in Ulster

Research your Irish and Scots-Irish Ancestry ...

... with the Ulster Historical Foundation. We are a non-profit family history research organisation with over 50 years experience tracing your Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors.
We have over 2 million Irish family records available to search online including Birth, Marriage & Death (BMD) records for Antrim and Down, Gravestone Inscriptions, Street Directories, Census Records and more.

http://www.ancestryireland.com/

Celebrate St Patrick's Day with Sandwell Irish Society


The 1641 Depositions

Portrait of Henry Jones, head of the deposition commission
and later bishop of Meath from
Trinity College Dublin art collection.

Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641... 

More

http://1641.tcd.ie/

The Great Parchment Book of Northern Ireland


This blog records the project to conserve, digitally reconstruct, transcribe and publish the manuscript known as the Great Parchment Book.
Led by London Metropolitan Archives, the project includes contributions from Derry City Councils Heritage and Museum Service, and University College London (UCL EngD VEIV Centre in collaboration with UCLDH).
The Great Parchment Book is an early 17th century survey of the County of Londonderry. This manuscript has been described by the University of Ulster as forming almost a ‘Domesday Book of Derry’.
Moreover, it is a manuscript that has been completely inaccessible to scholars for over 200 years, since it was heavily damaged in a fire at Guildhall in 1786. The manuscript forms part of the collection of the Hon The Irish Society housed at London Metropolitan Archives. It is hoped that the development of new digital methodologies will allow the opening up of the obscured text and enable the production of usable 3-D digital images and a transcription of the complete manuscript.
These techniques have never been tried on manuscripts before, and so, if successful, would provide exciting possibilities for other damaged parchment manuscripts in the City of London’s collections and beyond.
This blog will record our journey. 
http://greatparchmentbook.wordpress.com/

Sunday 20 January 2013

First article in The Harp - January 2013


 

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

From a monument in Westport, Co.Mayo
Pete Millington's article for the February 2013 edition of The Harp:
According to official figures reported in the Index of the Irish Census of 1861, there had been a decrease in the population of Ireland of 4.2 per cent between 1851 and 1861. The largest decrease was amongst the Irish speaking population of Connaught who had been most adversely affected by the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.

On the other side of the Irish Sea, the General Report of the 1861 Census for England and Wales shows us that 601,634 people recorded in that Census said that they had been born in Ireland. The highest number were recorded in the counties of Lancashire (217,320 or 8.9% of the total population), followed by Middlesex (80,499 or 3.6%) and then Yorkshire (50,664 or 2.5%). Other counties close to London had high Irish populations (Kent 21,671 and Surrey 22,467), as did Staffordshire (19,176), Cheshire (28,613), Durham (27,719) and Northumberland (15,034). Warwickshire was 9th highest with 14,297 residents of Irish birth in 1861 (2.5% of the total population).       
Some of my own ancestors were among those fourteen thousand Irish born residents of Warwickshire in 1861. My three times great grandmother Mary Flynn from Galway was a widow living with her seven children at Northwood Street in Birmingham in 1861. Their ages ranging from 6 to 24. The same family were living at Smith Street, Newtown in 1871. Another branch of my father’s Irish ancestors were the Finns who can also be found living in the Newtown area during the middle to late 19th century.



A deserted village on a hillside at Achille in Co.Mayo
But whilst many Irish people came to live in the West Midlands following the post-Famine decades, many also settled here before then.

Thousands of Irish people came to England in search of agricultural work in the first half of the 19th century and a lot of these people put down their roots in urban areas like Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country which were expanding due to industrialisation. In my own family research I discovered a great, great grandmother named Alice O’Hagan who was born in Bromsgrove in 1847. Her father was variously listed as a ‘traveller’ and on another occasion also a salt hawker. The O’Hagan family settled in the Lee Bank district in the late 1800s, on Wharf Street in Birmingham’s thriving canal area.
This sort of evidence can not only help us to learn about our own ancestors but also helps us to create an early history of the Irish and Irish-descended communities of the region and I hope that readers of The Harp will contribute to the rich collective story as this new feature evolves throughout the year of The Gathering in 2013 and beyond.

I wish to thank Frank Callery of Piltown, Co. Kilkenny who has already contributed an enquiry for our new feature. Frank is hoping to trace descendants of his mother’s uncle, James Halpin, who settled in Birmingham with his wife. The couple may have had two daughters and a son.
Frank told me “James was born in 1905 and lived at Dominick Street and 183 Parnell Street in Dublin. My mother remembers that he worked in a rubber or tyre factory in Birmingham, which may have been Dunlop.

“Two of the Halpin brothers were fighting for Irish freedom in 1916, another brother Christy, was fighting out in France; my mother remembers that he was wounded. Certificates have just been issued by the Irish Government for John and Francis Halpin, for their service in 1916 and the War or Independence in 1922. If there are Halpins still in Birmingham, we would like to send them copies.
If you can help to trace the Halpin family in the West Midlands, please get in touch with me, Pete Millington. Frank Callery would like to get in touch as these family history documents may be of interest to them.    

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com