Remaking History
'The yard was littered with chunks of masonry and smouldering records; pieces of white paper were gyrating in the upper air like seagulls...”
So wrote the eloquent Ernie O’Malley, Republican soldier and hero of the war of Irish Independence in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, ‘the white seagulls’ were precious papers from the Irish Records Office, a magnificent six-storey Victorian building in the centre of Dublin, destroyed in a battle between forces who favoured or opposed the treaty with the British government that would end that war.
Ernie O’Malley (image credit: thewildgeese.irish)
That battle, which sparked a civil war in Ireland, would have many lasting consequences for the new state, not least of which was the loss of a sizeable chunk of the new nation’s historical past.
The Irish Records Office contained seven centuries of documented history, hundreds of thousands of government records dating back to the 13th century and touching on almost every aspect of life in Britain’s Irish dominion. Census records, Chancery records, details of grants of land by the crown, thousands of wills and title deeds, the files of various chief secretaries to Ireland and centuries of parish registers were all incinerated.
It was a calamity for archivists and historians who were forced to spend the next 100 years having to work around this enormous hole in the official record, hampering the study of Ireland’s past.
But not any more. Historians, archivists and computer scientists will bring Ireland's Public Record Office back to life by creating a digital reconstruction of the destroyed building and refilling its shelves with fully-searchable surviving documents and copies of the lost records.
This extraordinarily ambitious project, called Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury hopes to open its portals by June 30th, 2022, the centenary of the fire. It is the brainchild of Peter Crooks, a historian at Trinity College Dublin, who discovered copies and correspondence relating to the Chancery records he was researching back in 2011. If there were copies and duplicates of these records in other archives and libraries, he thought, could there be similar records for other historical periods? With a government grant and other ‘seed funding’, he set about finding out. Interest grew in his researches, boosted by the Irish government’s Decade of Centenaries, a programme which took a fresh look at the decade leading up to the formation of the Irish State from 1912-1922. Now five institutions are involved in the second phase of the project: the Irish National Archives, the National Archives at Kew, the public records office in Northern Ireland (PRONI) , the Irish Manuscripts Collection and the library at Trinity College Dublin. It is funded by €2.5 million from Ireland’s Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
Trinity College Library, Dublin (image credit: unsplash.com)
At least 200 volumes of transcripts for digitisation have been identified in archives in Ireland, the UK and the USA. A team of 10, including researchers attached to PRONI and the National Archives in Kew, will delve into a number of archives around the country..
So far, identifying the sources of duplicates has worked to a “greater extent than ever previously imagined,” says Dr Ciaran Wallace, deputy director of Beyond 2022. “It helps that we know something of what was lost, thanks to the work of Herbert Wood, who was then assistant deputy keeper of the Irish record office. In 1919, he produced A Guide to the Records Deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland, a 300 page long index of the collections and series held in the archives.”
This was augmented by the work of the first deputy keeper of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (which was created on the partition of Ireland in 1922). Dr David Chart spent 20 years replacing many of the lost records by approaching solicitors, business people, politicians, churches and the landed aristocracy who provided church records, wills and the extensive private papers of major aristocratic Irish families like the Kenmares and the Earl of Leinster “The trail was laid back then,” says Stephen Scarth, head of public services at PRONI. “What we are doing now is bringing it all together.”
Together with a 1928 report which tried to point future researchers to the sources of some copies of the lost records, these documents are the foundations of this unique archival quest. Replacement materials have been identified in clerical copies, facsimiles, printed editions and published calendars, as well as original holdings from across the world. “So because we know what was lost, the task is to find out where any duplicates and surrogates, that’s material which is not absolutely like for like,” adds Scarth.
The history of England’s relationship with Ireland is also the history of bureaucracy’s obsession with duplicates and even triplicates of documents stored in different places.
“Much of the archive consisted of correspondence from somebody to somebody; - so there’s often a duplicate of the original elsewhere. Crown Patents, for example, usually have a copy in London,” says Wallace.
But it is also the result of centuries of past generations of historians and archivists lovingly copying such documents. Their efforts have turned up as part of private depositions, reports by genealogists and other institutions, such as courts. For example, the administrative records of the National Archives of Ireland (which survived the fire) show that one day, seven cartloads of records from Armagh Court of Assizes arrived at the back door of the building. Tracing leads like this has enabled researchers to unearth significant caches of material.
Other sources can be located in the files of organisations like the Irish Records Commission set up in the 19th century to transcribe ancient records. Their transcripts had been printed and sold and ended up in the US and other countries. The Royal Irish Academy has 45 volumes of manuscripts.
One of the major contributors to the project will be the National Archives at Kew. It holds an extensive collection relating to the governance of Ireland from 1200 onwards, says Neil Johnson, principal records specialist on Ireland.
“Orders and responses on a vast range of business crossed the Irish Sea because the Irish Exchequer was required to account for its time and present receipts for audit at Whitehall.
In the modern period correspondence, legal records and notes issued by the Crown existed alongside the records of the Irish Treasurer,” he says.
As the complexity and scope of the English government in Ireland expanded, so did the administrative and bureaucratic communications. Kew’s holdings include original correspondence, clerical copies of letters and accounts, as well as grants, petitions and commissions of office. A good example are the letters patent, the standard means of communicating royal business, which contain grants of land and money, appointments to office, pensions, pardons, power of attorney, treaties, proclamations, and letters of safe conduct.
“Beyond 2022 has provided the impetus to look again at the collections and try to unearth poorly catalogued or previously unknown material,” says Johnson. “We have had a considerable amount of goodwill and lots of colleagues in other libraries and archives are interested but takes time to identify everything. Its a daunting task.”
Another pioneering aspect of the project is the restoration of damaged records. Not everything was lost in the fire. Two hundred and seventy-two boxes of material, which had been gathered together by staff in the aftermath of the fire were retrieved and locked away ready for the moment when their singed innards could be restored. The National Archives of Ireland, with the support of the Irish Manuscripts Commission, sponsored a conservation project to look at these parcels of ‘salved’ material, which had remained hidden for nearly a century. The survey identified the parcel-contents and quantified the condition and historical significance of the documents, some of these which date back to the 14th and 15th centuries.
Subsequent cleaning, humidification and flattening have stabilised the material which “were baked rather than burnt,” says Dr Wallace. Thanks to new techniques being used for the first time, many of these will be restored to life and will take their place on the virtual shelves.
By the launch date of 30th June 2022, all of this material will feature in a website containing a virtual reality reconstruction of the destroyed building, recreated from original architectural plans and photographs. It’s been designed with maximum ‘ wow factor’, according to the computer engineers who are part of the Beyond 2022 team. Visitors will be able to wander once again in the spectacular six-storey Victorian archive with its iconic arcade of 30-ft tall windows, its expansive glass ceiling and intricate ornamental ironwork. Browsing the virtual shelves they can link to substitute or surviving records held by archives and libraries around the world. Using a common online platform, users will have at their fingertips 50 million words of searchable material, ranging from basic descriptions to fully restored records.
“It’s important to us that all this will be free to the end user – accessible at all levels from school pupils to professional researchers,” says Dr Wallace. “We are expecting a major public response akin to that when 1901 census records were released online. Then there was a huge public enthusiasm. If we get anything like that, we will be happy.”
ENDS