June 30th, 2022, marks the centenary of the explosion and fire at the Four Courts, Dublin, which destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) and, with it, centuries of Ireland’s collective memories and records.
The losses in that historic fire include records of the payment of taxes, the enactment of laws, births, marriages and deaths, wills, maps, parish registers and town records from across the island.
Beyond 2022 is an international collaboration to launch a Virtual Record Treasury for Irish history—an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury destroyed in 1922.
Across the globe, more than seventy repositories hold substitute materials that can replace the documents destroyed in the Four Courts blaze. Thanks to pioneering digitization techniques, the project aims to automatically transcribe large volumes of handwritten records, allowing users to connect, group and search diverse records from archives across Ireland and the World.
The Beyond 2022 team is working to assemble a complete inventory of loss and survival of the 1922 fire. In doing so, the team has identified ten main categories of surviving or substitute sources:- Survivors: records that survived almost unscathed because they were held in the Reading Room of the Public Record Office, not the Record Treasury itself
- Salved records: records damaged by the fire, but not completely destroyed, now in varying states of conservation
- Duplicates of original records now held in partner archives
- Facsimile images made before 1922
- Antiquarian transcripts
- Printed editions
- Certified copies
- Published calendars summarizing the contents of the records
- Unpublished calendars in manuscript form
- Legal abstracts
Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury will gather into a single database all the information it can about these substitute sources from archives and libraries in Ireland and internationally. The entire archive will be fully searchable, with its contents ranging from basic descriptions to fully restored records ranging in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This is a truly stunning project which will help ease the frustration of many researchers trying to trace lost Irish ancestors, and significantly fill the gaps in Ireland's history that the fire created.
