Lost Irish History Unearthed After Centuries
700 Years of Records Relating to Espionage, Corruption, and Daily Life Now Available
A remarkable project has recovered and released a vast trove of historical records from Ireland, offering unprecedented insights into espionage, political corruption, and the lives of ordinary people spanning seven centuries.
Unprecedented Historical Data Uncovered
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, a collaborative effort led by Trinity College Dublin, is making 175,000 records and millions of words of searchable content accessible to the public. This initiative has digitally reconstructed a massive archive destroyed during the Irish Civil War, involving historians, computer scientists, and other specialists.
Delighted to see the @virtualtreasury now has the “age of conquest” portal online, which provides access to the early records from the Anglo-Norman period (1170-1500) & to state papers (1660-1720) https://t.co/bK9F6l7B1R
— Peter Crooks (@PeterCrooks) October 25, 2023
“It’s a very significant scale of data,”
—Peter Crooks, Trinity Historian and Academic Director
According to recent data, digitization efforts have increased exponentially, with global digital data projected to reach 221 zettabytes by 2026 (Statista).
The Destruction and the Recovery
The Public Record Office, once the envy of scholars worldwide, housed invaluable medieval troves before being obliterated in Dublin during the Irish Civil War. The project has involved collaboration with 75 archives and libraries to source transcripts and duplicates of documents, many forgotten in storage.
The latest material includes 60,000 names from lost censuses, providing a data repository for genealogists and descendants of the Irish diaspora to trace their family lineages, according to Ciarán Wallace, a Trinity historian and project co-director. The project’s “age of conquest” portal includes Anglo-Norman Irish history and state papers from the Tudor era.
Impact and Future
A new search tool called the Knowledge Graph Explorer is now available, allowing users to identify people, places, and the connections between them. The diaries available for research also detail the underhanded dealings that brought about the abolition of the Irish Parliament in 1800, according to Joel Herman, a research fellow on the project.
