Annaleigh’s talk is entitled
Digitising seventeenth-century Ireland: the 1641 depositions, the Down Survey and contemporary maps as a source for family and social history
Date: Friday June 16th
Time: 3-5pm
Venue: Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street.
In recent years, the online publication of seventeenth-century sources for Irish history, has given greater access to many valuable resources. The launch of the 1641 depositions project online became a landmark in the digitisation of materials from the early modern period. More recently, the publication of the Down Survey online offered quite a different, although complementary, source to specialists and non-specialists. Moreover, the ever-expanding digital collections of many libraries across Britain and Ireland, have increased the availability of primary source materials. These sources offer a unique glimpse into Ireland, as plantation society began to emerge, and develop, in many parts of the country. Significantly, they also bear witness to the destruction wrought by war in the 1640s and early 1650s in Ireland.
This paper seeks to elucidate how these sources might be examined for use in family and social history. The paper will begin by focusing on the 1641 depositions. It will explore their conservation, digitisation, and publication. It will examine the online resource to show how it can be searched effectively and what we can learn about families and their social world from these testimonies. It will then move to examine the Down Survey materials and examine how these maps capture much about the state of the cultural landscape of Ireland after over a decade of sustained warfare and destruction. In doing so, it will draw some comparisons with earlier seventeenth-century maps that are now available online from many libraries in Britain and Ireland.
Biography:
Annaleigh Margey is a Lecturer in History at Dundalk Institute of Technology. Originally from Letterkenny, she studied for her BA and PhD at NUI, Galway. Her PhD research titled ‘Mapping during the Irish Plantations, 1550-1636’, focused on the surveys and maps created by surveyors in Ireland during the decades of plantation. She subsequently held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and a J.B. Harley Fellowship in the History of Cartography to continue this research at Trinity College Dublin. More recently, Annaleigh has worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen on ‘The 1641 Depositions Project’ and at the Institute of Historical Research, London where she conducted research on the property and charity of the Clothworkers’ Company in early modern London. She has also worked as a researcher on a project at NUI, Maynooth and the National Library of Ireland focusing on the rentals and maps in the landed estates of Ireland collections in the library’s holdings. Most recently, she has edited a book with her colleagues Elaine Murphy and Eamon Darcy on The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion, and will shortly publish another book Mapping Ireland, c.1550-1636: a catalogue of the early modern maps of Ireland with the Irish Manuscripts Commission. She regularly presents, and writes, on the Irish Plantations, early modern cartography, and the 1641 depositions
This is a free ticketed event. To reserve your place please email
The Expert Workshops are open to everyone interested in Irish research with a particular emphasis on Family History.