There was a post on soc.genealogy.ireland yesterday about Griffith’s Valuation. Various parts of Griffith’s have been minimally indexed online over the years, but this is the first time it’s been published in its entirety, for free. And it’s not just a transcription, either. It includes scans of the original pages, as well as the corresponding maps.
Why is this big news? The only extant censuses for Ireland are from 1901 onward. Pretty much everything before 1901 was destroyed accidentally by fire or flood or deliberately by government decree. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are all that are available to the public. There was no 1921 census, due to the civil war. The first census of the Irish Free State was taken in 1926. That will be the next available census, but because Irish privacy laws prohibit the publishing of census records for 100 years, it’s not yet available. The 1901 and 1911 censuses were released ahead of schedule, because of the dearth of Irish vital statistics. There is a push to do the same with the 1926 census, so hopefully it will be made public soon. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
So, back to Griffith’s. The reason it’s such a valuable tool is that it is the only full, extant “census” of Ireland from the mid 1800s. It has its limitations, though. For a start, it only lists the name of the tenant, so names of spouses, children, and extended family are not available. It also lacks any sort of biographical information on the tenants, so you cannot use age, marital status, etc. to help determine whether or not you have a match. It does, however, list the name of the landlord, as well as mapping the tenant’s holding(s).
I haven’t had much time to dig into it, but I did a quick search and found at least one Basquill who was a tenant of the 3rd Earl of Lucan. I wrote a little bit about the famine here, which should give you some idea of what sort of major league sociopath the good earl was.
My problem now is figuring out how to cite the damned thing. You would think that the folks who’ve indexed and transcribed it would want to provide proper bibliographic information for it, wouldn’t you? Or have I been in Library La La Land for too long?
red paper boat 