Fire has the potential to have a devastating impact on family history records. This has long been evident in the impact the loss of the Dublin Public Records Office on researching Irish ancestors.
The Battle of the Four Courts, the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War, began on 28 June 1922. National Army forces of the Irish Free State were attempting to drive Anti-Treaty Republicans from the Four Courts, and other locations in Dublin.
The Anti-Treaty garrison had occupied the Four Courts and the Public Record Office 10 weeks earlier, on the night of Holy Thursday 13 April. The Easter date was significant as it linked their campaign with the Easter Rising of 1916. From April to mid-June 1922 political tensions grew, but there were still some friendly contacts between the two sides. In late June the Free State’s National Army surrounded the entire Four Courts complex. In the early hours of Wednesday 28 June they gave the Anti-Treaty forces an ultimatum – evacuate the building or they would open fire.
At around 4.45 am, just before sunrise, an artillery gun firing 18 pound shells opened fire on the building, accompanied by machine gun and rifle fire. The battle had begun.
Early in the afternoon of 30 June, after two days of fighting, the Four Courts was shaken by a tremendous explosion.
This shattered the eastern wall of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office and threw burning material in among the paper and parchment records. The explosion produced a dramatic pillar of smoke and flung files, books and scrolls high into the air. Scraps and fragments fell on the streets of the city, some even landed in Howth, 10 km away.
The remains of the Record Treasury
The old, dry records on the shelves quickly caught fire. The
flames destroyed practically all the records in the Treasury. Within a
few hours seven centuries of Ireland’s historical records were gone.
Immediately the opposing sides blamed each other for the disaster. More usefully, though, within days the staff of the Public Record Office began rescuing any surviving records from the ruins. These rare, charred documents, called the ‘Salved Records’, were carefully stored for future investigation.
Amazingly, the fire break designed to save the Record Treasury, worked — but in reverse, protecting the administration office at the front from the terrible fire in the Treasury. This saved many catalogues, and books that described and summarised the records, from the flames.
Along with the Salved Records, these catalogues and summaries were the starting point in rebuilding the lost Irish records.
