Beyond 22: Virtual Record Treasury for Irish history

Thanks to Gail Dever of Genealogy a la Carte for reporting on "Beyond 22: Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury"

The Beyond 22 website explains:

June 30th, 2022, marks the centenary of the terrible explosion and fire at the Four Courts, Dublin, which destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) and, with it, seven centuries of Ireland’s collective memories. While incomparable with the loss of human life, the destruction of the Record Treasury at the PROI was one of the great tragedies of the Civil War.  

Beyond 2022 is an all-island and international collaboration. Working together, we will launch a Virtual Record Treasury for Irish history—an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury destroyed in 1922.

What an exciting new project for those of us with Irish ancestors! According to the organizers, more than seventy repositories world-wide hold substitute materials that can replace the documents destroyed in the Four Courts fire.

The Project has four phases: Discover, Digitize, Reconstruct, Reveal

With the identification of those records, Beyond 22 will digitize and restore what is found, then bring them online for researchers, historians, and genealogists to access.

I am looking forward to searching these records for my McGinnis, Downey, Jamieson, and Greenlees families. What names will you be looking for?

Update to Free Irish Births, Marriages, Deaths

Sample Page of Deaths

An additional 2 years of records of births, marriages and deaths have been added to the www.irishgenealogy.ie website.  The marriage Index data along with additional images has also been updated for the years 1864-1869 inclusive.

The years covered by the release of the historic records of Births, Marriages and Deaths after this update are

Births: 1864 to 1918
Marriages: 1864 to 1943
Deaths: 1878 to 1968

Records include transcripts of the baptism and marriage records of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kerry to c. 1900, All Roman Catholic baptism, marriage and burial registers for Dublin City, All surviving Church of Ireland baptism, marriage and burial registers for Dublin City, and more

Visitors can search the database freely. Images are also available. If you have Irish ancestors you will want to check this site out.

Library of Trinity College in Dublin

There are so many amazing genealogical and research websites out there, and more surfacing all the time. As wonderful as that is for us genealogists, it also becomes challenging to find out about all of them.

I recently became aware of this wonderful site's collection of genealogical materials. The Library of Trinity College Dublin will undertake limited genealogy research.

Some of their digitized records consist of School Entrance records 1637-1961

Be sure to also see my article Irish Lands Stolen By Oliver Cromwell


Do yourself a favour and check out the site if you have ancestors who might have been in the area.

1911 Letter to Santa Found in Chimney

Did you write Dear Santa letters as a child? Did your children? Mine did. I still have one that my oldest son wrote when he was five years old.

But recently a letter to Santa written 100 years ago, on Christmas Eve 1911, was found stuffed in a chimney in a house in Ireland.
A brother and sister - Hannah 10 and Fred 7, wrote the letter and stuffed it in the chimney for Santa to find on his way down on Christmas Eve. It lay undisturbed except for a bit of scorching from fires lit in the fireplace, until 1992.  

Written on Christmas Eve in 1911 in Dublin, the letter is signed by “A or H Howard.” Along with their Christmas wishes, the children  included illustrations and a wish of good luck. The children hoped for “a baby doll and a pair of gloves ... apple... a gold penny.... and a long toffee” 

1911 Census Dublin Ireland

According to the 1911 census for Oakland Terrace, Dublin Ireland there were three children living at the address in the year in which the letter was written. The youngest of them, Hannah, who was 10 at the time, and Fred (presumably short for Alfred) who was seven, fit in with the initials on the letter. A third child, a 13-year-old called Lily, is also listed in the census. Their parents were listed as Fred Hamer Howard and Mary Elizabeth Howard, both age 41. Everyone in the family were born in England.

A search of Ancestry.com shows that the father Fred died in the first quarter of 1920 in Dublin. Fred and Mary were married 18 Aug 1894 in Albert Memorial Church in Collyhurst, Manchester England. Fred's father was Moses Howard and Mary's father was William Dean.