The other Joyce

The housing estate I live in was the second one built by Dublin Corporation after the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922. The 800 or so houses were all completed and leased to their new occupiers less that two years after the project began in 1926, a proud feat no Irish local authority could match today.

The pride of the city planners in their fledgling state was also reflected in the names they gave these ten new streets. Each of them was named after a writer or scholar who had contributed to the revival of Irish culture that had seeded the independence movement. In particular, they celebrated men (all men) who had contributed to the revival of the Irish language. So Walsh Road (Paul Walsh),  Fleming Road (Seán Fleming),  Ferguson Road (Sir Samuel Ferguson)  and so on.

Very interesting, I hear you say, but what the heck has this got to do with genealogy? Joyce Road, just around the corner from me, was named for Patrick Weston Joyce (1827-1914), author of The origin and history of Irish names of places (Dublin, 3 volumes, 1869-1913). Irish names of place are, of course, at the heart of Irish genealogy and Joyce spent more than half a century collecting and interpreting them. His three volumes constitute the classic foundational work of the modern study of Irish placenames (dinnseanchas).

The originals are long out of copyright and available in multiple formats at archive.org and LibraryIreland. I’ve often used them whenever I come across a particularly weird intriguing placename. And I’ve always found them frustrating. The first two volumes consist of slightly antiquated thematic sections, “Names Commemorating Artificial Structures”, “Boundaries and Fences”, “The Animal Kingdom”. Low-quality, image-only PDFs and even lower quality OCR make them a nuisance to search. Volume 3, however, is a composite and extension of what Joyce did in the first two, the culmination of his life’s work in fact. And, praise be, it’s in dictionary format, with almost 10,000 entries covering whatever took his fancy.

Dictionary format, eh? That’s almost a database.

So a couple of weeks ago I set about converting Volume 3 into database tables and integrating it with the placenames section of the site.  If Joyce has covered any of the placenames you find (or any of their parts), you now get a link (helpfully labelled New!) to take you to what he says. There are a depressing number of bogs and marshes and plain fields, but there are also many little jewels:

Cloonboo in Galway ; Cluain-bugha, meadow of the bugh or hyacinth plant, a sort of flagger with beautiful flowers of a blue or bluish-green colour, well known in Clare and Galway. Often mentioned in Irish writings : “eyes the colour of the bugha flower.”

Some of the information is outdated, he’s a bit too interested in Irish language grammar for my taste and some of the scholarship is of the gentleman amateur variety.  But Joyce’s work is still an extraordinary achievement. Have a look at his treatment of the ubiquitous “Bally”. Especially for someone who doesn’t speak Irish, he offers a vivid overview of the names that surrounded our ancestors in their everyday lives.