|
|
              |
Landed
Estate Records
Until the late nineteenth century Ireland
was a county of large estates. Visitors
to Ireland were struck by the great mansion houses like Powerscourt, Castletown
and Castle Coole. Gate Lodges,
demesne walls and model villages, such as Adare, Celedon and Moy, are reminders
of way in which the great estates dominated the countryside.
Many of the great estates were concentrated un easily identified territorial blocks, often comprising dozens of townlands. The greater estates were often distributed through two or three counties; the marquis of Downshire had 115,000 acres in Antrim, Down, Kildare, King’s County and Wicklow; Lord Landsdowne owned 120,000 acres in Counties Dublin, Kerry, Limerick, Meath and Queen’s; and the marquees of Conyngham owned more than 156,000 acres in Clare, Donegal and Meath. From the mid 1870s the size of most estates could be found in Thoms Directory. This took the form of an alphabetical list of landowners of ten thousand acres and upwards and a list of landowners in Ireland of 1,000 acres and upwards who owned land situated in different counties. By 1870s over half the land was owned by less than 1,000 major landlords. A list of the land owners was compiled, 1871-1876, by Government order and printed in the Return of Owners of land of One Acre and Upwards, in the Several Counties, Counties of Cities, and Counties of Towns in Ireland, to which is added A Summary For Each Province and for All of Ireland (Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty). Dublin, 1876. Copies are available at major archives and libraries. Estate
papers are an invaluable source for family historians. It is not uncommon
to find the records of a single estate have been deposited in more than one
archival institution. The family may have donated the papers in their
possession to one institution, while those retained on an estate office or
solicitor may have been passed onto another. Nevertheless, estate papers offer the best opportunity to
trace ancestors into the eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries. Estate
records are held by repositories throughout Ireland including PRONI, the
National Archives and National Library, Trinity College, Dublin, the Boole
Library at NUI, Cork, the Hardiman Library at NUI, Galway and the Cork Archives
Institute. Some are deposited in local libraries and museums. With
many of the great landed families owning land on both sides of the Irish sea,
Irish estate records are also held in British archives. Indeed, in the
case of absentee or semi-absentee landowners who had estates in Ireland and
Britain, estate collections can been scattered amongst a number of repositories.
This will require greater detective work on the part of the family historian who
will need to find out where the records have finally been deposited. Most
county record offices in Britain publish summary guides to their holdings on the
internet and copies of the detailed reports and calendars are available
centrally in the National Register of Archives at www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/indexes.htm.
Collections in provincial and national
archives are also summarised in the excellent Directory
of Irish Archives by Seamus Helferty and Raymond Refausse.
|
