Transcript

This talk … Incidentally, I am staggered at the number of you who are willing to tear yourselves away from the 1911 to come and listen to a talk on any other topic today. And I am well aware that I am not really the world expert on Irish records, so if you are, and you happen to be sitting here, and I say something that you think needs correction please shout out. Let’s not leave everybody else in the dark.

I am going to give a talk which is based largely on records which are accessible at the London Family History Centre, which is opposite the science museum on Exhibition Road. It is a family history centre organised and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And it is free for anyone to use. But we will go through the different kinds of records that we have.

Now, we are very motivated to learn about land records in Ireland in a way that we are not so motivated in England, because of the absence of the censuses and because of the later start of the civil registration.

The first thing that I am going to do though is to show you that there is a very large range of records from Ireland which are not land records and which can also be very valuable and helpful to you. We will refer to a couple of these. For the people in the podcast, these include cemetery records; there are fragments of censuses and of course the 1901 and 1911.

Civil registration is widely thought to have disappeared. It hasn’t disappeared at all, it’s complete, it just starts in 1864. There are many, many church records, directories and then maps … and the normal. There is a hole in the probate records but there still are probate records, school records, taxation records and voting records. Whilst some of them are classes of records that you wouldn’t normally use in England, in Ireland everything of course is Irish and that means that it is beguiling in a way and you have to search it out.

Now today I am going to focus, and we have records of all of these types at Exhibition Road which is actually the best place on this island to look for Irish records. Today I am talking about land records and I am going to do it a little bit chronologically, starting with what are called the Tithe Applotment Books. Now the Tithe Applotment Books were made because there was a requirement to pay tithing to the Church of Ireland. You can imagine how popular this was in certain counties. But the valuation was taken to establish a base for tithe. So in a certain way you can say it’s a sort of a nineteenth century dooms book isn’t it? Then Griffith’s [Valuation] is similar – when we get to it – where you make a big evaluation across the whole Country and try to figure out who has got what so that you can ask them for some kind of money with some kind of excuse on it.

I try here to be non-sectarian but it’s pretty clear that the exemptions were applied unfairly. You didn’t have to pay the tax if you were a large land holder that had pastures, you didn’t pay any tithing on that. But a poor man who had two hills of potatoes behind his house had to pay tithing to the local church of Ireland, a vicar.

The valuation does not show genealogical information per se. what it shows is the occupiers of agricultural holdings listed with the amount of land and then the corresponding tithing which is due. Because these were taken between 1823 and 1837 they establish a kind of, if you will, first quarter to second quarter nineteenth century view of who had how much land.

Now, what I am going to go is to show you some examples, some images, of them, but before I do I have to give you some bad news about them and some good news about them. The bad news is that there are no records extant for the whole country; although they are quite … they do cover a wide area. The really bad news, which I am sure will be solved in I would say the next couple of years is that right now only the six counties of Northern Ireland have been indexed. So if you knew your person were in County Cork you are going to be looking for quite some time because there is no name index. We have all become spoiled very quickly about expecting that something will lead us to a name index.

The good news is that the six county index is online and you could look at it if you have an Ancestry subscription at home. Or you can look at it in any library or facility which has Ancestry.co.uk.

Now I am going to show you, I think, what an entry looks like. [Shows image] This one is from County Waterford so it’s not from one of the places which would show up on Ancestry. It says: ‘Applotment of the amount of composition for the tithes of the parish of whatever – Drum – and the county of Waterford, payable to the Reverend William Bush.’ Here is the nomination, the landlord and the critical bit is the occupier because it’s the occupier who is now heavy. Again we are taxing the poor man and not the man who owns the land. We’re tithing the man who is occupying the land … This is the acres and this is the waste; and then on this side of the page comes the amount of tithing due.

So if your relative were this person, John Brown, online too, where it says he has four acres, then on the corresponding side will be an amount of money that he would be supposed to pay to this particular vicar. And it meant therefore, you can imagine that the local church of Ireland vicars throughout the Island must have been extremely unpopular individuals because this money was paid directly to the opposing clergy men in your area if you were a Catholic. So I can imagine that they would have been – and we will come later to the reaction to this kind of tithe. But that’s what they look like.

Here is another book with a different parish. [Shows image] Here is the occupier Mr John Curtain. It’s telling you how much he has, how much rent he pays and how much the acreable value is and lists – here it says this is the quality of the land, third quality, fourth quality. In a way it’s a simple form of a survey isn’t it? Because you get charged more if your land is a higher quality and less. So, for example, here he had 1433 acres but it’s all mountain and he is charged therefore little on the other side. So he owns half a mountain but he doesn’t have to pay too much tithing. I think that this is the other half of the entry we have just looked at, showing the value and with a note that the gentleman pays this amount of rent for the entire land, which as you can see was about 1500 acres. So he’s a quite a well-to-do occupier.

Towns and buildings come into the Griffith’s Valuation. But this is an agricultural thing. You remember the tithe barns that you have seen in parishes in England, it’s that kind of thing; that was an agricultural thing.

Now, if you were going to search these in Ancestry, I find – I don’t know how you find Ancestry – the hard part about Ancestry is to find the record class that you know is in there, that you are trying to search. You can do that, they have various ways that you can find that. There are ways where you can see the whole catalogue. There are key word searches; if you say “Ireland” as the place you are trying to search and then look for land and property records, you will find it in that list. Then you can click a button and come to searching the Tithe Applotment Books in this way. It works, when you do it you get an entry and I have typed in the name which is a family name of mine, McLean, and my people are from County Down.

But remember this index which is here is only going to show you six Northern Ireland counties. Which is why you see Down and Armagh and Antrim and Londonderry and so on and you don’t see Cork. Now if you had a memory you will remember that I just showed you an illustration from the County of Cork and another one from the County of Waterford. So it doesn’t mean that there aren’t Tithe Applotment books for other Counties. It means that the only thing you can search online automatically is the six Northern Irish counties, which is good for me because that’s where my people where from. They were probably less inclined to be really mad at the Reverend whatever.

Now the Tithe Applotment books have been all filmed by the LDS church. We have the complete set of films at Exhibition Road. Now the good news for you is that if you know where your relative is listed, the catalogue for the applotment books is actually organised by place. So you can go, this shows just the beginning of the catalogue showing places that begin with “A”, and as far as I know the places that are shown here are parishes, I don’t think they are town ones I think they are parishes. I will go home and look into and find that I am wrong, but I think they are parishes. That would tell you the family history library film number that you would want to look at and you would find that we would have that. Now it doesn’t mean, and I need to stress again, that every parish has a Tithe Applotment Book, but there are some across, as far as I know all of the counties, but only six counties with indexes.

[Shows image]

So, if you want to have a go and your people are from one of the parishes, for example here’s a parish called Aglish – I don’t know how you pronounce that, I am not very good at Irish. “Ambrosetown” I can almost say. Then you would come and ask for that film, turn to the part of the film which has Ambrosetown on and start looking for your ancestor’s name. One of the glories of Irish records is in what small groups the Irish lived. That’s why if you know the townland and you know the parish you can get right too where there aren’t more than six or seven families that are in that tiny little place. They give a name to every two houses by the side of the road. That’s a very, very useful thing if you happen to know what that name is.

In this case if you were seeing this all you would see in the record on Ancestry is the name of the person, the place where they were living and the year. Because there is no image which shows you the written records as I showed you is on the film. What you would be able to do if your ancestry – on Ancestry, if your relative was from Northern Ireland you would type them in. you would find oh yes, he’s listed in this record. And in his case, this valuation was done in 1828. In the other case you would have to go and look at the parish where you think your person is, rummage around in it and see if you can find the name of your person. Even if that were my person I would then be looking for Edenderry in the LDS film index. Finding the film number that I want and going to look at the entry to see how many acres and what the value was and what class of land was: first, second, third and fourth, mountain, bog. They are all kinds of descriptions that could be given. Is that clear?

No genealogical information, but you have the link of a person that you are related to, to a certain place and you learn something about that place. You can see whether he had more land, less land than his neighbours and whether his land was better or worse than the man next door.

The next great thing about, which everyone has heard is called Griffith’s Valuation. Now this is not a church tithing situation. This is a situation where everybody’s productive capacity of all of their property, buildings, land and everything, was assessed for taxation purposes. The valuation books are for each barony or Poor Law Union. They do show the names of the tenants, the names of the owners, the acreages and the valuation and a description. Well, the valuation of buildings and land, that’s the report.

I forgot to say that the Tithe Applotment is basically a snapshot of land occupiers before the famine. Whereas, since most of Griffith’s was taken after the famine, Griffith’s is really a description of occupiers and holdings after the famine, or during the famine, depending on the time that the record was taken.

These records were published. As far as I know the Tithe Applotment Books never were. These records were actually published in a printed form and I will show you an example of that. You can look at the printed form; there is a national index for Griffith’s Valuation. It’s available in more than one place and you can look at the printed form online. So, the other comment that I should make is I think it’s just wonderful that there is a gap of roughly a generation between the Tithe Applotment and Griffith’s Valuation. So, if your people were sedentary and they stayed, you may well see the occupier as “grandpa” in the Tithe Applotment and then one of the sons in the next, in Griffith’s Valuation.

The index to the tenants of Griffith’s Valuation has been published in many ways for a number of years. There was a CD for a long time and the index to the tenants therefore is available on Ancestry and it’s also available on British Origins. British Origins has uploaded the images of the actual reports … I have given you a handout and I don’t think the handout says anything about British Origins, I can’t remember. Anyway have a look.

Now, what the slide tells you is that on Exhibition Road we keep microfilms of all the summary reports but you now don’t need those, because we also have on Exhibition Road a subscription to British Origins, a library subscription. So if you want to look up your person in the index and then see the report immediately you can do that at Exhibition Road without having to subscribe to either Ancestry or to British Origins. So now, for the printed reports, you are pretty well served online.

The bottom bullet however on this slide is the thing that I think is great because I don’t know anyway to see the actual valuation book today, although these may well come up eventually, except to come and look at the LDS microfilms of these valuation books. I am going to show you what they look like so your appetite will be whetted.

[Shows image]

I think first I talked you about how to go about doing it through Ancestry and it’s the same sort of thing. You get the same kind of record in Ancestry, if you look at the image. It just gives you the name of the person and tells you in this case he lives in a town, Banbridge. It tells you which street he lives on but it doesn’t give you anymore information. The summary report however does give you his name and it gives you a description of the property to which he is an occupier. It tells you whether it’s land or whether it’s a house and the Irish word here, “Offices”, is used for outbuildings or any kind of building that isn’t a dwelling.

And so in this particular Barony of Magunihy, or something like that, in the union or Killarney, in the parish of Aghadoe. Here is a list of the townlands and the occupiers. So the first townland is Aghacurreen, you see there, and in each townland there are not that many occupiers. In this case there are eight. One of them is a woman who is the occupier and the immediate as far as the description.

Then comes the area: acres, rods and perches; then the rateable valuation depending on the acres, rods and perches and the valuers assessment of this land; then a summary of the land value and the building value comes to such and such a total; then it gives you the same total for the whole townland. Now this is quite a bit more exact than you have in the Tithe Applotment, partly because it occludes the assessment of the offices and the houses, as well as the land.

Now I am going to show you what the treasure I have told you is behind this looks like. So if you take one of those, all of a sudden now you are looking at the kind of report that a surveyor might write today if he was sent to a corner of the Irish countryside to value the land. In this case he says that there are ’80 acres, three rods and 37 perches of rugged limestone pasture, with a very thin indented skin producing a rather hard herbage, about one fifth tolerable. Also, poor, dry, shallow, rocky, arable in patches with a little moory.’

Well now that’s a very Irish description, but it’s also a very clear, professional description of what the piece of land is. The bad news is that you will notice that on the page you can’t see who the occupier is. What you can see is that you are in a particular parish and now you are in the townland of Glasbolie and here is a description. So how can you match this to the Griffith’s? Well, it’s actually not that hard is it? Because I showed you what the summary report looks like. There aren’t going to be more than at most, let’s say, a dozen people in most of the little townlands. All you have to do is match up the number acres, rods and perches and then you know which one he is writing about. That’s why it’s going to be a long time before these things get indexed, can you see? Because there are no people names to index them on. You could index to the townland and then you could, somehow you would have to transcribe the whole blessed townland. But it’s wonderful, wonderful material and I think, makes all the difference over the printed reports which just gives you these acres, rods and perches and the amount of the buildings and so on and so forth.

Here is the continuation of the same report in which he is talking about waste at houses, which undoubtedly is the yard outside the house. And then again a limestone pasture and so on. He is giving very detailed descriptions of what this looks like: ‘Pale, gravelly clay of moory tendency but occasionally some soft ground, rather shallow.’ So he is getting a professional land assessors view of what the property is that this person is the occupier to.

Again if you are patient you can look and see whether your chap has got the bad bit in the bog and your – his neighbour has the good bit which is arable … In a way it’s a better description than the censuses. I have always thought that you can sort of see the social history in by looking at the census of the street where your people are living in the village. This is very much the same sort of thing. Here is a third one, the townland of Knockbane: ‘Poor, moory arable of difficult access. Bad, wet, sandy subsoil.’ As a result there’s an amount, a quantity, of acres: eight acres, three rods, nine perches. The rateable value per acre on this page varies between 0.1 per acre. I suppose this is shillings and pence, so that is ten pence per acre. Right? This is nine pence per acre, that’s seven and six.

Then he translates that into a pound, shilling and pence value. The poorest land on the page is this land which is assessed at nine pence an acre which is described as ‘bad pasture.’ Right after it, ‘bad brown heathy mountain’, which is assessed at ten pence per acre. So there is a very – so can see this as actually very comparable to what a modern surveyor would do in assessing land. He must write this detailed description to justify the difference in the valuation that he is giving.

You can’t tell any of that from the printed report. From the printed report you just see that one person has four acres and so many rods and perches, and he gets charged more than somebody who has got ten acres and so many rods and perches. You don’t understand why that is unless you can these wonderful, wonderful materials. I personally think these are the greatest treasures of Griffith’s. The church microfilmed them in the last ten years, so we haven’t had them very long. I will give you a little bit of background about how to use them, because it ain’t easy.

Now this particular page which I am showing you is the description of a different kind of valuation. Here we are not valuing a piece of property; we are valuing somebody’s mill. In the value of the mill we have the diameter of the mill wheel, the diameter of the mill stones, the breadth of the bucket, the depth of the standing and the fall of the water, and a description that this particular mill only works about two months in the year and has a bad supply of water, and has one pair of mill … I am not sure quite what.  Can you read that for me? [To audience] Here is the name of the valuator, here, and here is the date that he valued it, on 7 July 1838.

Now, obviously, later on they got new mill stones and a new mill wheel and he came back and measured it again. So it’s crossed out and new dimensions put in and no doubt a new value. Now I think that’s priceless. If my person were the one living on the mill, I would be making scale models because he has given you all the information that you need to be able to do it. Occasionally there are little drawings but this is professional valuation work of a very high level.

Here’s another one which is a property in Donegal. Here we are not given a detailed description of the particular houses, but it says Mrs Margaret Whitehouse and offices and the amount of houses, one third being deducted. It’s in pounds, shillings and pence. Then it says as the fifth item, Roman Catholic Chapel and the Sexton’s house is valued at three pounds seventeen shillings and no pence. This is valued on 9 April 1836 which two valuators who are coming together to assess this. But you see at the bottom the Roman Catholic chapel and yard have been exempt but not the Sexton’s House. So these are wonderful, wonderful records.

The good news is that they exist and they are actually quite easy to read. The bad news is that there are no indexes by occupier of any kind and that the way the church has chosen to catalogue the microfilms, it doesn’t tell you the name of the town land on the cataloguing. In fact it doesn’t even tell you the name of parish on most of the cataloguing. What it tells you is the county and the barony.

Now we are trying to do something about that on Exhibition Road. There are about 352 of these microfilms and we are going through all of them. The first cut is to try to make an index of all the parishes. Because it is not true … The books obviously were presented to the microfilmers in a reasonably random order – maybe it’s in the date order of when the valuations were done – but one county can appear at several places in the series, so you can’t find all of County Donegal in a couple of consecutive films.

So it’s quite laborious now. If you were to say I’ve gone online, I’ve sorted out Griffith’s, I’ve seen the printed report. I now want to see the valuation behind it; it’s going to be quite hard work. You can do it and we have the records, but until we get a little better at index for using them. You can do it but it will take you a little while. You will have to find all of the bits that are in the right county and then figure out which barony your thing is. Then you will just have to brute force go through the whole darn barony looking for your place.

I love Griffith’s but my enthusiasm for it has picked up very markedly since I realised that there were these valuation books behind it. I think you could write a most wonderful article for a family history magazine or anything. Just showing the types of material that’s there. I am sure like with the censuses there would be lots of wonderful examples to use.

Now I am going to talk about the registry of deeds which may or may not be of interest to you. It isn’t the same kind of lined record that Tithe Applotment or Griffith’s is. The registry of deeds has to do with the fact that from the early 18th century to the middle of the 19th century there was quite a lot of what you might call “irregular” transfer of land from people belonging to one particular religion, to people belonging to a different religion. The difficulty with such a thing, however that transfer happens, is that it hasn’t happened in a normal way and then the new owner wants to register a title.

So the registry of deeds is a voluntary register of title of land held exclusively by Protestants, starting in the early eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. Having said that the index is not by the person who got the land but the index is by the person who had to give it up. That person is called the grantor. They’re the ones who are giving up the land. The grantee is the one who is registering the title. There is also an index by townland and there are some town indexes … I would say that if you are a beginning Irish researcher, unless you’re quite sure that your protestant ancestors were reasonably prosperous, I would leave this for a little while and concentrate on other things because using the registry of deeds is not for the faint-hearted.

Here is an example of a place index where it’s talking about a certain county and a barony and then it is giving a list of land, telling us what the parish is, the name of the grantor, the name of the grantee, the year that this happened in. then various reference numbers which lead you to the document that describes what has happened. So this is an index. Not the document itself but an index by place and done in that very common nineteenth century way where you put all the B’s together but they are not alphabetically within B’s. Right? They have got all the A’s together and all the B’s together and so on.

So that’s the index by place. [Shows image] Here is an index by town which is actually giving you the transactions by street. For some streets there are no entries and for other streets there are. So there is a town index, we have seen a place index and now we are going to look at a grand tour index which is of course alphabetical by the name of the grantor. In this case, the third one down is called George Kallaghan, spelt with a K. by some amazing circumstance the grantee is also called Kallaghan, also spelled with a K. Obviously I can’t explain that … You don’t see the rest of the page where it gives you now the numbers that you would need as your key to how to find the record of the registry of the title. Here is the other half of that page for Kallaghan where it’s showing you the year of the registry, the number of the transcript book, the page in the book and the number of the memorial. So what this is, these are indexes that send you to a certain document.

Now, at Exhibition Road today we keep all of the different indexes for the registry of deeds. We do not keep all of the microfilms for looking at the transactions. We have a great many of them but we don’t have all of them. You can order the one once you know what you want and what year it took place, if you want to look at the specific thing. I should put in an example of what it looks like so you would be motivated to do that and I will try to improve that before I give the talk the next time. There may be, there is nothing on this island, now way to see them. That’s absolutely right, there isn’t any way. That’s a good question.

What I will do is I am now making up the list of things that we are going to ask for. I have to ask for few each year. I will look into how many films we are missing compared to how many there are. If you want to know the ones we have you could look at our online catalogue and the address is on the little blue card that you were given.

Now I am going to talk about some things which are not specifically land records but which relate to land use and I am just including them so you don’t forget about them. This was a little CD Irish flax-grower’s list from 1796. I should have put it at the beginning before the Tithe Applotment, if I’m going to do it, but since it’s not properly a land record… It does have 56,000 flax-growers on it. But all it tells you is the name of the grower and the county they were living in. if it were more specific about where the person was living it would be more useful. I suspect the church has filmed this too because you do get in the record that you can see on Ancestry. Again, it’s the reference numbers that lead you to the actual thing, which is saying roughly what scale of flax-grower he is. Here is the ID for an entry like that.

[Shows image]

And jumping now to 100 years later, there is also a thing called return of owners of land 1876. Which, again, gives you for the owners of the land and not the occupiers in this case. It is searchable by name and it is searchable by place. It will tell you the name and the place and the acreage and the value at the one point in time, but only for owners and that’s a much smaller group than the occupiers.

I forgot to say, in the case of the Tithe Applotment Books that, I mean I feel a little embarrassed about making all those people pay tithes to a clergyman which whom they were not in sympathy. So, of course, being good Irish people there was a protest about this. People, not surprisingly, refused to pay, particularly in some parts of the country. Then the relevant clergyman, who was being robbed of his income by these people – who were probably not really his parishioners but lived within the bounds of his parish – he had to complain that they were not paying their tithe. The reports of his affidavit, the injured clergyman whose income is being curtailed because these insolent neighbours are refusing to pay their tithes to him also exists and you can examine that on British Origins as well. It was published as a CD and it can be seen on British Origins. I am trying to remember what it’s called … Tithe Protestors, or something like that and the date is 1831.

There are 29,000 of these people but 10,000 of them are in one county, they are from 12 or 14 Counties. So there is no record from every county. There are no records from Northern Ireland counties for obvious reasons. You might want to check on it. It might be called Tithely Faulters. There were even things that were called tithe … they weren’t riots but there were certainly protests, there were organised protests.

This is the form for the return of the owners of land and here is the County Down, an entry for the return of the owners of land which you can see has the name of the owner, the address of the owner, the amount of acres, rods and perches and the valuation. But nothing to do with the actual … It tells you the address of the owner, that’s not necessarily the place where his land is, right? He may be living in one place in County Down and have properties spread across the County. As this person here, you see who is living in Dundrum and has 2,585 acres. They may not all be immediately around Dundrum. But it does, again, give you some, a bit of social history some idea who are the large owners and who are the small owners. It’s clear there are a few large owners and a number of middle-sized ones. This is the description of what the return of owners of land is, where it tells you very helpfully that they have kindly arranged the entries by county alphabetically for you. So it’s as good as having an index.

Now I am going to say just a few things about voting records. Again they are not particularly, really, land records. On the other hand, sometimes you find in the LDS film catalogue things which are essentially land records listed under voting records. An example of that is here in the County of Roscommon where, under the general title “voting records” it says a list of freeholders in Ireland in the time period 1760 – 1788. The little yellow tip which is written at the top of the page says that the catalogue of the holdings of our place are organised in two different ways. You can look by parish, but if you are looking within something that covers the whole county or the whole country there is a separate set of topics covering a whole county and that might be archives, it might be census, which is also listed by parish. It might say “voting records” or “probate” or something, which is organised at a bigger than parish level. This is saying if you want to look to see whether in your county there are any voting records like this that would be helpful to you, you need not to look under the parish but look under the county as a whole and that list of topics.

Now as you can see this isn’t all that polished a record but it’s still there and in the case of Irish records we are always grasping at straws. So we are eager to look at any lists, particularly if it’s vaguely alphabetical and see if we can spot something which would be of any help to us.

Now that concludes the number of records that I am going to talk to you about today.

[Shows image]

I have put up on the screen now my favourite book for learning about Irish records, which is John Grenham’s book, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, now out in its third edition. He does go through the records county by county. He will tell you in some exactitude what is there and what isn’t there for very many kinds of records, including land records. If you haven’t got one of these you need to find some place where there is one that you can make use of. We have one, you must have one, it’s right out there in the reference, I’m sure it is. So I think it would be well worth your time. You could go downstairs and buy one, but you would probably only want to look at three pages and it’s sitting just outside, so it’s no reason not to do it.

Alright. Well, in summary, there are records. None of them give whole families. None of them tell you how old the occupier is. But they are spread widely over time and there are quite a different range of records. There are wonderful materials that go with them, like the valuation books and the maps, which you were kind to remind us about. More and more of them are now becoming available online so that it’s easy for you, the ones that have been indexed to see whether your person is there and whether you can find them. I don’t find, since most of the indexes were made by local people, I don’t find huge problems with transcriptions that we have with the census records. Although you do find from time to time of course variant spellings of the name that I have been illustrating which is McLean which is spelled and pronounced in a variety of ways and you just have to bear that in mind.

Well, happy hunting to you. We will be happy to help you if you chose to come to Exhibition Road. I have shown you the things that you can do online without coming to Exhibition Road. I’m glad to have the opportunity to be here to talk.

[Shows image]

I have my one last slide which will take 30 seconds which I forgot about. Here it is; it’s a slide which just reminds you that we, as Mormons have religious purposes for doing this kind of work and that’s why we gather records. We believe that our families can be together forever in the next life, together with all those Irish ancestors. That’s why we do gather these records and make them available to you, as well as to us.

Thank you very much.