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Chapter FIVE
PROPERTY RECORDS
Census and church records, along with the state birth, marriage and death registers, are the only Irish sources specifically designed to record family information. From here on all your research will be on material created for other purposes in which any family information is incidental -not quite the bottom of the barrel, but on the way.
The townland is a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. At its simplest a townland is an area of rural land perceived as a unit by the people living there. This is a long, long way from postcode mathematical precision, and in fact the size of a townland can vary hugely, from a few small fields to more than a thousand acres. The townland was and is the basic unit of a rural address in Ireland. Since the vast majority of the population was rural until very recently, a townland address is one of the most important, if not the single most important goal of Irish research. Up to the end of the nineteenth century townlands were organised into civil parishes, almost identical to Church of Ireland parishes, and used as the basis of local administration and therefore local records. The standard reference work, the Townlands Index, is based on the 1851 census records and lists more than 60,000 townland names. It is available online at www.ireland.com/ancestor and www.seanruad.com.
GRIFFITH'S VALUATION
By far the most widely used and easily available Irish source is the General Valuation of Rateable Property in Ireland, known as 'Griffith's Valuation', after Sir Richard Griffith who supervised its creation. Its aim was to produce a consistent valuation of all the property in the country in order to provide for a uniform system of local taxation, and in this respect Griffith was extraordinarily successful. The Valuation Office (still in existence) produced the results between 1847 and 1864 in a series of volumes arranged by county, barony, Poor Law Union, civil parish and townland, which list every landholder and householder in Ireland. Apart from the townland or street address and the occupier's name, the particulars given are:
The only directly useful family information given is in areas where a surname was particularly common. When the surveyors were faced with more than one individual with the same Christian name and surname in the one townland, they often adopted the Gaelic practice of using the father's first name to distinguish between the individuals, so that 'John Brady (Patrick)' is the son of Patrick, while 'John Brady (Michael)' is the son of Michael. At times an occupation (fiddler or weaver for example) is cited; on the rare occasions when two women of the same name are recorded as occupiers -almost invariably widows -their maiden names might be used to distinguish them.
Because the Valuation entries were subsequently revised at regular intervals, it is often possible to trace living descendants of those originally listed by Griffith (see the Valuation Office, below).
Although never intended as a census, the Valuation has acquired an unlikely significance because of the destruction of nineteenth-century censuses in 1922. As things stand, it gives the only detailed guide to where people lived and what property they possessed in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
Availability and indexes
Copies of the Valuation are widely available in major libraries and record offices, generally on microfiche.
The first quasi-index dates from the 1960s, a county-by-county series known as the 'Index of Surnames' or 'Householders' Index' which gives a count for each civil parish of the number of householders in the Valuation. A similar count (via database) is available at www.ireland.com/ancestor.
Microfiche indexes, which list alphabetically all the householders in the Valuation and show the townland and civil parish in which the entry is recorded, have been produced by All-Ireland Heritage and are available in the National Library.
A CD-ROM index to the entire Valuation was published in 1997 by Broderbund Software in association with Heritage World of Dungannon and the Genealogical Publishing Company. You should sup with a long spoon when using it. Large portions appear to be missing, including Limerick city and all surnames after “L” in wide swathes of south Tipperary.
An online subscription version is available from www.otherdays.com.
Another online version, pay-per-view, is at www.irishorigins.com.
What Tithe Books contain
From a genealogical point of view the information recorded in the Tithe Books is quite basic, consisting typically of:
In addition, many Books also record the landlord's name and an assessment of the economic productivity of the land; the tax was based on the average price of wheat and oats over the seven years up to 1823, and was levied at a different rate depending on the quality of the land.
Tithe defaulters
An organised campaign of resistance to the payment of tithes, the so-called 'Tithe War', culminated in 1831 in large-scale refusals to pay the tax. To apply for compensation for the resultant loss of income, local Church of Ireland clergymen were required to produce lists of anyone liable for tithes who had not paid, the 'tithe defaulters'. The lists can provide a fuller picture of tithe-payers than the original Tithe Book, and can be useful to cross-check against the Book, especially if it dates from before 1831. In the National Archives Chief Secretary's Office, Official Papers series, 127 of these lists survive. They relate principally to Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary with some coverage also of Counties Carlow, Cork, Kerry, Laois, Limerick, Louth, Meath, Offaly, Waterford and Wexford. A full list was published in The Irish Genealogist, Vol. 8, No.1, 1990. County-by-county microfiche indexes have been produced by Data Tree Publishing, www. alphalink.com.au/ -datatree. These are available at the National Library of Ireland.
Availability and indexes
.Microfilm copies of the Tithe Books are available in the National Archives and the National Library.
.Microfilm copies for the nine counties of Ulster are available in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
.The LOS Family History Library has microfilm copies of the full series.
.A CD-Rom index for Counties Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone was published in 1999 by Family Tree Maker.
.The Index of Surnames or Householders' Index includes an indication of whether a surname appears in a particular parish.
The usefulness of the Tithe Books can vary enormously. Since they only give names, with no indication of family relationships, any conclusions drawn are speculative; but for parishes where church records do not begin until after 1850 they can be the only early records surviving. Valuable circumstantial evidence can sometimes emerge from them, for example where a holding passed from father to son in the period between the Tithe survey and Griffith's Valuation.
THE VALUATION OFFICE
The Valuation Office, set up to carry out the original primary valuation, is still in existence and has two related sets of records that are potentially valuable. The first of these are the notebooks used by the original Valuation surveyors, consisting of 'field books', 'house books' and 'tenure books'. All three record a map reference for the holdings they deal with, as in the published Valuation. The field books record information on the size and quality of the holding; the house books record the occupiers' names and the measurements of any buildings on their holdings; and the tenure books give the annual rent paid and the legal basis on which the holding is occupied, whether by lease or at will. The tenure books also give the year of any lease, useful to know before searching estate papers or the Registry of Deeds.
As well as containing information such as this, which does not appear in the published Valuation, the valuers' notebooks can also be useful in documenting any changes in occupation between the initial survey and the published results, for instance if a family emigrated in the years immediately before publication, since they pre-date the final publication itself by several years. Unfortunately they are not extant for all areas. The National Archives now houses those that survive for the Republic of Ireland. Those covering Northern Ireland are now to be found in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
The Valuation Office also holds the 'Cancelled Land Books' and 'Current Land Books' which give details of all changes in the holdings from the time of the primary valuation up to the present day. Any variations in the size or status of the holding, the names of the occupier or lessor, or the valuation itself are given in the revisions carried out every few years. The books can be useful in pinpointing a possible date of death or emigration or in identifying a living relative. A large majority of those who were in occupation of a holding by the 1890s, when the Land Acts began to subsidise the purchase of the land by its tenant farmers, have descendants or relatives still living in the same area.
The Cancelled Land Books for Northern Ireland are now in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The LDS Family History Library has microfilm copies of the Valuation Office books. Unfortunately the films are in black and white, while the amendments to the books are colour coded.
ESTATE RECORDS
Estate records really should be well down the list of research sources because they are difficult to use and they produce results only in a small minority of cases. Their existence is due to the fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century the vast majority of the Irish population lived as small tenant farmers on large estates owned for the most part by English or Anglo-Irish landlords. The administration of these estates produced large quantities of records -maps, tenants' lists, rentals, account books, lease books etc. Over the course of the twentieth century as the estates have been broken up and sold off; many collections of these records have found their way into public repositories.
Because of the size of the estates, it was quite rare for a large landowner to have individual rental or lease agreements with the huge numbers of small tenants on his land. Instead he would let a significant area to a middleman who would then sublet to others, who might in turn rent out parts to the smallest tenants. So it is very rare for estate records to document the smallest landholders.
The largest collections are in the two major Dublin repositories, the National Archives and the National Library, and in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, but there are Irish estate papers in English County record offices and archives, in Irish county libraries and museums, and some still in private hands. The sole comprehensive guide is Richard Hayes's 'Manuscript Sources for the Study of Irish Civilization' and its supplements, copies of which can be found in major libraries. This catalogues the records by landlord's name and by county, which means that this is the minimum information you need to find a relevant collection.
Only the PRONI collection is fully catalogued in sufficient detail to make research focused on particular areas feasible. For the National Library and National Archives a more detailed guide to the dates, areas covered and class of tenants recorded is in preparation by the National Library in association with the Irish Genealogical Society of. Minnesota -to date, Counties Armagh, Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Fermanagh, Kerry, Kildare, Leitrim, Limerick, Galway, Mayo, Monaghan, Roscommon, Sligo, Tyrone, Waterford, Westmeath and Wicklow have been covered. The results are available at the Archives and in the Library genealogy room.
Like so many unlikely Irish sources, when estate records do turn out to be relevant, they can be very rewarding, especially for the period before the major nineteenth-century surveys. To take one example, the Connolly estate in south Donegal has records from the early eighteenth century that record a large number of leases to smaller tenants, often specifying family relationships. But the majoriry of the rentals and tenants' lists only give details of major tenants.