Early Irish newspapers are a much under-appreciated source, at least for that small minority to whom they are relevant. That minority was literate (in English), almost all belonged to the Church of Ireland and they were geographically concentrated enough to provide sufficient readers. So the main areas of publication were Dublin (from about 1720), Belfast (1737), Cork (1750), Limerick and Clare (1750), Carlow/Kilkenny (1768) and Waterford (1770).
Given that so many early Church of Ireland parish registers have been destroyed, the usefulness of family announcements is obvious. In some cases they will be the only surviving record. More interesting for hunters of closet skeletons are the âadvertisementsâ and business announcements. Many of the former consist of husbands publicly disowning their runaway wivesâ debts; many of the latter are bankruptcy notices.
One reason why these newspapers are underused is that they are not digitised to the same extent as nineteenth-century publications. The London Stamp Office began passing copies of the publications it regulated to what is now the British Library only in 1822, which means that the Libraryâs collection (being digitised at britishnewspaperarchives.co.uk) is quite patchy for newspapers before that year. There is a decent collection on Ancestry.com) (image-only, for some reason) and the Irish Newspaper Archive has a good run of the Freemanâs Journal, The Belfast News Letter and Finnâs Leinster Journal.
But for years the only decent large-scale shortcut into these papers has been Rosemary ffolliottâs vast and painstaking âIndex to Biographical Notices Collected from Newspapers, Principally Relating to Cork and Kerry, 1756â1827â and âIndex to Biographical Notices in the Newspapers of Limerick, Ennis, Clonmel and Waterford, 1758â1821â. As well as her legendary thoroughness, Rosemary brought a nicely tuned sense of humour to the task. Here are two index entries transcribed from her Cork and Kerry index:
âC[ork] C[onstitution] Thu 6 Nov 1767 married last Sunday Mr Harding Daly of Whitehall near Kittmount to the agreeable widow Fleming of Hamon’s Marsh with a fortune of ÂŁ800â.
Followed immediately by:
âC[ork] C[onstitution] M 9 Nov 1767 the paragraph mentioning the marriage of Mr. Hardng Daly to the widow Fleming appears to be without foundationâ.
Evidently Mr Harding Daly was chancing his arm.
Iâve been banging the drum about the ffolliott indexes for years, hoping someone would digitise them. My heart leapt last month when I saw that FindMyPast had put up a transcript. Off I trotted to track down the images for Harding Daly and the agreeable widow Fleming. No sign of them. So I started to poke about and some serious peculiarities showed up. A newspaper (from Portuguese-speaking Ennis?) called the Clare Journao. Also the Cloneml Advertiser, the Xlonmel Gazette, Â Rinnâs Leinster Journal, the Limerick Chhonicle, Â the Limerick Evening Postl. And a periodical called Fitzgerald Penrose. Wha?
Browsing the transcripts threw up even stranger oddities. A single transcript from the Cork Constitution where there are almost 13,000 from the Limerick Chronicle. Eight transcripts from the Cork Journal, as compared to 800 from the Waterford Chronicle. Only 131 entries for the whole of Cork, with 1587 for Limerick.
So it would appear that only the Limerick, Ennis, Clonmel and Waterford index is actually there. It would also appear that nobody bothered to look at the transcripts before putting them online.
The moral, once again, is that you should give all online sources a good poking before trusting them.
More on newspapers in the browse section. Also county-by-county listings of dates and location.