Beyond 2022 Research Showcase Marking the Centenary of the Custom House Fire

Tuesday, 25 May 2021, 2:30 – 5pm People, Place and Power: Grand
Jury Records and Local History Presented in association with Local
Government Archivists and Records Managers. Links to videos in
podcast - People, Place and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local
History - Donegal - YouTube
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5csuCtgQFY8 People, Place and
Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History - Wicklow Archive -
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1roH2WOJBs People, Place
and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History - YouTube Offaly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDVOFf7SnqY In the 18th and 19th
centuries, the Grand Jury was ‘most important local body in rural
Ireland’. Its records are a unique source for Irish local history,
social change and genealogy. While many Grand Jury records were
destroyed during the 1916–1923 period, vital collections still
survive at local level across Ireland, where they are preserved by
Local Archive services. The showcase will reveal how the Grand
Jury’s decisions impacted directly on daily life, enforcing the law
at the local level, collecting taxation and deciding where it would
be spent. Grand Juries did more than build roads, bridges,
courthouses and prisons. They paid for orphaned children to be
boarded-out, escorted convicts for transportation, and produced
very early and highly detailed maps of their districts. Professor
Virginia Crossman, author of Local Government in Nineteenth-Century
Ireland, will discuss the significance of the Grand Jury records
for historical research. The showcase will also visit – virtually –
the reading rooms of three Local Archive services across the
country, in Counties Donegal, Offaly and Wicklow, bringing you into
contact with these fascinating records. Speakers: Professor
Virginia Crossman (Emerita, Oxford Brookes) Niamh Brennan (Donegal
Archives); Lisa Shortall (Offaly Archives); Catherine Wright
(Wicklow County Archives & Genealogy Service) Brian Gurrin and
David Brown (Beyond 2022 Project). Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/