An online treasure trove of local history

Now that the Autumn is coming, it’s an appropriate time to consider some enjoyable activities for the many shorter evenings ahead.

Many of us love knowing more about where we are from, about the people who came before us, as well as details of how they lived and understood the world around them. We call those things our traditions and our heritage, and they are dear to us, especially as we get older.

Nowadays accents seem to be blending and stories come from whichever social media platform we are on. There seems to be something uniquely fast moving about this world we live in. In these days, traditions seem to disappear so fast, some fear, without a trace.

But of course the tradition of being worried about the loss of old traditions is not new: it is itself, in truth, traditional. From the later part of 19th century on, those involved in the nationalist movement in Ireland were especially concerned that we were losing our distinctiveness, that which made us uniquely Irish. That is what led to the founding of the Gaelic League, the GAA and any number of other institutions. It is what led Douglas Hyde to wander about Connacht, collecting love songs which he then published in a book, and by so doing recalling the lost bardic poets such as Raftery.

Independence for Ireland was thought by many to be a turning point, but of course flying a green flag did not prevent many traditions and aspects of heritage continuing to be lost. Some were lost for poor reasons — for example, when their usage was a marker of poverty, and the modernisation changed the meaning and need for them. There has always been a touch of ambiguity in many of our minds about some aspects of this. But there is uniformity of view about the importance of being able to recall them, and to do so in a way that contained some authenticity.

And so back in the 1930s, our new state established a Folklore Commission to capture and record many of our traditions, customs and particular forms of speech, with the Commission gathering up and recording the folklore from all over the island. There were some full-time collectors who did this work, but also those who made submissions and contributions and went out as volunteers and gathered material. Schoolteachers were in the vanguard of that in a lot of places.

These records have became the National Folklore Collection and they are physically stored in UCD. So many of the great collections which detail our history and traditions were once solely secured away in archives, making it very hard for the amateur enthusiast or even general reader to access them, or even to find out they existed at all.

The process of digitising so many of these records has opened them up and made them more accessible — and especially so with this particular collection. By digitisation, they can be placed on the internet and brought to every home with a connection. Carrying out this time intensive task means that you can access and read records that once could have taken a full day to even travel to access.

We are all familiar with the census records and other online catalogues and resources that allow us to research family history — for reasons of personal interest, curiosity or probate — and so this idea isn’t new to anyone these days.

But for local lore, stories and wider records of the lives and traditions of Irish communities, right down to local level, the records of the National Folklore Commission will be a new source of knowledge and interest to many. Online visitors can explore a large selection of books, manuscripts, audio recordings, videos, and photographs, drawings and paintings dealing with the widest variety of aspects of Irish life, folk history, and culture. The online front door of the collection is at www.duchas.ie.

Dúchas is the platform, created in partnership between the National Folklore Collection in UCD Library, and DCU, to digitise the collection and then make it easily accessible to everyone.

You could vanish down the rabbit hole following so many trails, but for this particular piece I’d like to focus in on one particular section of the collection. When you go onto that site, you will see an option called The Schools’ Collection.

This part of the overall collection was compiled by schoolchildren in the 1930s. Senior primary school children recorded more than 750,000 pages of local history and oral tradition, and the National Folklore Collection now includes some 18,000 of the children’s original school exercise books.

The Schools’ Collection is especially recommended to readers because there will be lots of immediately local and relevant material that you can easily look up. Thousands of children all over the country — and many of them were from across this region — were asked to collect the folklore from their home place, interviewing older relatives and neighbours, and then documenting those interviews.

So, a child in 1937 could have been interviewing a grandparent born in 1870, about what life was like in your local area back then.

You can read the names of those children who wrote up the records and also of those who provided these then young school children with the stories. The surnames will be well familiar to anyone who has even the remotest acquaintance with where they are from.

Everything they collected is now digitised. Because it’s arranged by location, anyone can look up their own region, and so you may even find an entry from your own grandparent, based on an interview with their grandparent, your own great, great grandparent. Even if you don’t find such gold, you will at the very least find a treasure trove about your own area.

If you go onto the site, look for the Schools’ Collection and then search by county and place. So, if you tap in ‘Mayo’ and then, ‘Kiltimagh’, for example, you will find 254 records for the wider Kiltimagh area alone. These are the writings of the young children of the district, photographed, and in neat handwriting, so quite easy to read, and they can even be magnified, and they are also transcribed in case of any difficulty.

I read the first 100 of the 254 for Kiltimagh and they covered such topics as: aspects of history of the area including from the Famine and penal times; precise details about local traditions and customs, including on marriage and the care of children; details on how older people lived; about the land and its uses; about medicine and cures and holy wells and all sorts; about the weather (of course!); about the location of old, presumably hedge, schools; much rich detail about placenames and how they came about; details of the techniques of old crafts, with churning unsurprisingly being high on the list; of festivals and feast days; as well as a delightful list of riddles.

Two examples of this last one I must quote: ‘The more you take from it, the bigger it gets? A hole.’ ‘What has an eye and cannot see? A needle.’ Children since forever have liked riddles – that’s traditional.

You can search for your own local area, and by reading these records you will learn much about where you are from, the people of that place, , and about keeping alive those things which were passed down from generation to generation.