Main pic, above: Inspecting transcriptions in the National Archives of Ireland are Zoë Reid, Keeper of Manuscripts, and Brian Gurrin, Population and Census Specialist, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland.
A letter seized from a man along the road between Donegal Town and Barnesmore Gap in 1661 has recently been discovered in London.
The correspondence, written in Irish and dated June 1661, is one of 175,000 new historical records which were released this week by Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI).
A copy of the original letter which is currently held in London. Credit: The National Archives UK TNA SP 63/307/2/194/D
The documents are now freely available online to mark the 103rd anniversary of the Four Courts blaze that destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland, and with it seven centuries of Irish history.
Trinity historian Dr Peter Crooks, Academic Director of VRTI, described the discovery of the Donegal letter as a ‘fascinating story’.
He said the local English authorities at the time seized the letter which was being carried by a Neale MacDavid when he was arrested. As it was written in Irish, they couldn’t get anyone to interpret it so it was sent to Dublin.
“They couldn’t get anybody local to interpret it and they thought this was highly suspicious,” he explained.
A section of the original letter which is currently held in London. Credit: The National Archives UK TNA SP 63/307/2/194/D
“This was in 1661, only 20 years after the 1641 Rebellion, so they sent it down to Dublin for investigation. It then gets sent over to London and when it finally gets translated it turns out to be a letter by the Franciscan Order saying Cromwell is dead, the new King has come in and their thinking is ‘maybe we can get better dispensation under the new Monarch coming in’. The letter relates to a proposed meeting of Franciscans in Mayo or Donegal and they hoped to reorganise their order under a more tolerant government.”
Of course, Dr Crooks adds, the English can’t read the letter, think it’s highly suspicious and it ends up in an intelligence file in the State Papers Ireland at The National Archives in London where it has sat for 400 years.
“And now it’s available online back in Ireland on www.virtualtreasury.ie,” he concluded.
The original translation, and the enclosing papers all survive.
Other Donegal gems on the Virtual Record Treasury include a map from the 1891 Census showing the ‘rateable valuation’ of land across Ireland. Landowners in Donegal paid 15 shillings while in Meath they paid five times as much.
In addition, the record contains a proclamation (below) in 1670 by the Lord Lieutenant offering a £20 reward for the apprehension (dead or alive) of ‘certain proclaimed Tories and rebels’ in the counties Donegal, Armagh, Tyrone, Monaghan, Fermanagh, Derry, Mayo, and Roscommon who do not surrender to the authorities.
A 1670 proclamation by the Lord Lieutenant offering a £20 reward for the apprehension (dead or alive) of ‘certain proclaimed Tories and rebels’ in counties including Donegal.
Launched three years ago, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is now home to over 350,000 records and 250 million words of searchable Irish history. Led by Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Department of Culture, the project brings together historians, computer scientists, archivists, and librarians working to digitally recreate Ireland’s destroyed public record office and its lost collections.
A total of 75 memory institutions across the island of Ireland and around the world are contributing digital images of replacement documents – transcripts and duplicates – to the Virtual Treasury. This includes core partners National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), The National Archives UK (TNA), the Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC) and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Among new treasures freely available online today for the first time are 60,000 names from the 19th-century census destroyed in 1922. Names from every county in Ireland are represented in the new Population Portal. Painstakingly compiled from transcriptions preserved in National Archives of Ireland and Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, these recovered transcripts of census returns reveal ordinary lives across the island of Ireland in the decades before and after the Great Famine.
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