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 ‘advertisements’ and business announcements. Many of the former consist of husbands publicly disowning their runaway wives’ 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 Library’s 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 Freeman’s Journal, The Belfast News Letter and Finn’s Leinster Journal.
But for years the only decent large-scale shortcut into these papers has been Rosemary ffolliott’s vast and painstaking ‘Index to Biographical Notices Collected from Newspapers, Principally Relating to Cork and Kerry, 1756–1827’ and ‘Index to Biographical Notices in the Newspapers of Limerick, Ennis, Clonmel and Waterford, 1758–1821’. 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:
“C[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 £800”.
Followed immediately by:
“C[ork] C[onstitution] M 9 Nov 1767 the paragraph mentioning the marriage of Mr. Hardng Daly to the widow Fleming appears to be without foundation”.
Evidently Mr Harding Daly was chancing his arm.
I’ve 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, Rinn’s Leinster Journal, the Limerick Chhonicle, 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.
For those with easy access to London the Irish Genealogical Research Society has the hard copy of Rosemary ffolliot’s papers which she donated to the society. They can be consulted at the IGRS library currently at the Society of Genealogists building on Saturday afternoons. See http://www.irishancestors.ie/resources/visit-the-igrs-library/
The society also holds other newspaper abstracts and biographical entries produced by Father Clare, Patrick Smyth-Wood, Michael Leader and others.
Try findmypast.com for newspapers.
Irish newspapers can also be useful to those of us in Australia with transported convicts in our ancestry, as newspapers may hold the only record of the crime. Early Irish convict indents were rather lacking in detail, a problem for the authorities here as well as for us.
Very interesting, I have been able to find out a lot about the way my ancestors lived through newspaper articles on FMP…mostly naughtiness…LOL, including my 4X great grandfather being found guilty of “Being intoxicated with liquor during Divine Service at the house of Thomas Nash, also know as The Anchor, at West Monkton, Somerset”, on 14th December 1790. I will now start looking into my Irish links in newspapers too. Thank you for the links and tips.
Located some “gems” on the Cork Constitution. My Gr-gr grandfather was evicted twice from his farm. Details how his wife was missing owing to “mental condition”!! In 1892 court case report there is mention of how many sons he had in Irl, America & Australia. Very valuable info from an unlikely source
Yes, this is good timing. I happened to try findmypast recently and came across the Ffolliot records. Found two references to a couple of Creans. Then, as you explain, John, when I tried to search for the actual newspaper records, they are not online anywhere. But, I suppose that if Ms. Ffolliott found the newspaper records, they must exist at least at the National Library? In any event, it is time for a trip to the NLI.
According to one of the Ffolliott records, Mrs. peter Crean was described as a “relict” of Peter Crean. I assume “relict” is not some sort of insult??
Widow
Thanks, John. I assumed it was something like that. I suppose the word has different connotations, today.