{"id":14854,"date":"2024-04-01T04:55:01","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T04:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/01\/a-new-chapter-for-irish-historians-saddest-book\/"},"modified":"2024-04-01T04:55:01","modified_gmt":"2024-04-01T04:55:01","slug":"a-new-chapter-for-irish-historians-saddest-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/01\/a-new-chapter-for-irish-historians-saddest-book\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Chapter for Irish Historians\u2019 \u2018Saddest Book\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/21\/multimedia\/00ireland-archives-01-cpmw\/00ireland-archives-01-cpmw-facebookJumbo.jpg?resize=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"A New Chapter for Irish Historians\u2019 \u2018Saddest Book\u2019\" title=\"A New Chapter for Irish Historians\u2019 \u2018Saddest Book\u2019\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In the first pitched battle of the civil war that shaped a newly independent Ireland, seven centuries of history burned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">On June 30, 1922, forces for and against an accommodation with Britain, Ireland\u2019s former colonial ruler, had been fighting for three days around Dublin\u2019s main court complex. The national Public Record Office was part of the complex, and that day it was <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/postcards-from-the-past\/salvaging-the-four-courts\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">caught in a colossal explosion<\/a>. The blast and the resulting fire destroyed state secrets, church records, property deeds, tax receipts, legal documents, financial data, census returns and much more, dating back to the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIt was a catastrophe,\u201d said Peter Crooks, a medieval historian at Trinity College Dublin. \u201cThis happened just after the First World War, when all over Europe new states like Ireland were emerging from old empires. They were all trying to recover and celebrate their own histories and cultures, and now Ireland had just lost the heart of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But perhaps it was not lost forever. Over the past seven years, a team of historians, librarians and computer experts based at Trinity has located duplicates for a quarter of a million pages of these lost records in forgotten volumes housed at far-flung libraries and archives, including several in the United States. The team then creates digital copies of any documents that it finds for inclusion in the <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/virtualtreasury.ie\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland<\/a>, an online reconstruction of the archive. Still a work in progress, the project says its website has had more than two million visits in less than two years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Funded by the Irish government as part of its commemorations of a century of independence, the Virtual Treasury relies in part on modern technologies \u2014 virtual imaging, online networks, artificial intelligence language models and the growing digital indexes of archives around the world \u2014 but also on dusty printed catalogs and old-school human contacts. Key to the enterprise has been a book, \u201cA Guide to the Records Deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland,\u201d published three years before the fire by the office\u2019s head archivist, Herbert Wood.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cFor a long time, Wood\u2019s catalog was known to Irish historians as the saddest book in the world, because it only showed what was lost in the fire,\u201d Dr. Crooks said. \u201cBut now it has become the basis for our model to recreate the national archive. There were 4,500 series of records listed in Wood\u2019s book, and we went out to look for as many of them as we could find.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A major partner in this hunt was the National Archives in Britain, to which centuries of Irish government records \u2014 notably tax receipts \u2014 had been sent in duplicate. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, which remains part of the United Kingdom, has also been a major partner, contributing records from the centuries before Ireland was partitioned in 1921.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A considerable haul of documents has also been uncovered in the United States. The Library of Congress, for example, dug up dozens of volumes of lost debates from Ireland\u2019s 18th-century Parliament. According to David Brown, who leads the Virtual Treasury\u2019s trawl through domestic and overseas archives, before this trove of political history came into Congress\u2019s possession, one previous owner had tried to sell it as fuel. Serendipity has often played a role in such U.S. discoveries, he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cYou would have old family records stored away in some gentleman\u2019s library, and he\u2019d move to the colonies, and take the books with him,\u201d Dr. Brown said. \u201cOr else heirs would eventually sell the old library off to collectors, and eventually an American university or library might buy the collection, maybe because they wanted something important in it, and they took everything else that came with it. Archivists may not always know what they have, but they never throw anything out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The Huntington Library in California, and libraries of the universities of Kansas, Chicago, Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard are among around a dozen U.S. organizations to respond positively to the hopeful request from the Irish: \u201cDo you have anything there that might be of interest to us?\u201d And in the process of hunting down material that is already on its radar, the Virtual Treasury team is also uncovering, and incorporating, unexpected treasures.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">One is a previously unnoticed 1595 letter shown to Dr. Brown late last year while he was visiting Yale\u2019s Lewis Walpole Library to view some other material. In it, Sir Ralph Lane \u2014 a founder and survivor of the infamous lost colony of Roanoke, off North Carolina, which had vanished in the decade before this letter was written \u2014 petitions Queen Elizabeth I to order the conquest of Ulster, then a Gaelic stronghold in the north of English-ruled Ireland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Brown, a specialist in early modern Atlantic history, said the letter \u2014 long overlooked because it was bound in a volume with much later documents \u2014 showed the close connection between England\u2019s colonial conquests in North America and Ireland, both in the personalities involved and their motivation. The letter suggests conquering Ulster primarily so that the English could seize the inhabitants\u2019 land, and it proposes paying for the war by looting the Ulster chiefs\u2019 cattle. The area was ultimately conquered and colonized in 1609, six years after Lane\u2019s death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cFor the Elizabethan adventurers, colonialism was a branch of piracy. All they wanted was land,\u201d Dr. Brown said. \u201cRoanoke hadn\u2019t worked out for Lane, and Elizabeth had just granted Sir Walter Raleigh 10,000 acres of land in Munster,\u201d in the south of Ireland. \u201cSo Lane thought, if Raleigh got 10,000 acres in Munster, why can\u2019t I have 10,000 acres in Ulster?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Another contribution to the project could be seen in contemporary Northern Ireland, at the Public Record Office in Belfast. The head of conservation, Sarah Graham, was restoring and preserving a collection of records and letters kept by Archbishop John Swayne, who led the church in Ireland in the 15th century. Watching her at work was Lynn Kilgallon, research fellow in medieval history for the Virtual Treasury. Once preserved, its pages will be digitized and added to Dublin\u2019s online archive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIf you don\u2019t understand the words in a book, it becomes just an object,\u201d Ms. Graham said. \u201cYou need someone to read it \u2014 medievalists like Lynn here, to bring it to life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">You do not necessarily need to be a specialist to read the documents in the Virtual Treasury, however. New artificial intelligence models developed for the project allow archivists to turn ancient handwriting into searchable digital text, with modern translations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The site went online in June 2022, the 100th anniversary of the records office fire, and is aiming for 100 million searchable words by 2025, a target it says it is three-quarters of the way to reaching. Eventually, it hopes to recover 50 to 90 percent of records from some priority areas, such as censuses from before and after Ireland\u2019s Great Famine in the mid-19th century, which are of particular value to historians, and to people of Irish descent tracing their roots. More than half of the details of the first nationwide census of Ireland, a religious head count in 1766, have been retrieved and published.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cCultural loss is sadly a very prominent theme in the world right now, and I don\u2019t think there is an example like this, where there\u2019s been so much international cooperation in the reconstruction of a lost archive,\u201d Dr. Crooks said. \u201cIt shows that the collective culture of many countries can be brought together to achieve a goal. Borders are fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the first pitched battle of the civil war that shaped a newly independent Ireland, seven centuries of history burned. On June 30, 1922, forces for and against an accommodation with Britain, Ireland\u2019s former colonial ruler, had been fighting for three days around Dublin\u2019s main court complex. The national Public Record Office was part of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/03\/21\/multimedia\/00ireland-archives-01-cpmw\/00ireland-archives-01-cpmw-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10613,6700,20562,7975,20563],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14856,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14854\/revisions\/14856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}