1641 Depositions Online

Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 4000 depositions, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641Preferred Browser - Internet Explorer

1630 Muster Rolls - R J Hunter Collection

The Muster Roll of the Province of Ulster is a large, leather-bound volume in the British Library, where it is shelved as Additional Manuscript 4770. The volume consists of 283 folio sheets, each slightly larger than a page of A4, on which are recorded the names of 13,147 adult males from the nine counties of Ulster. Each county forms a separate section of the volume and the men who mustered are listed under the names of their landlords; beside each man’s name there is a description of the weapons he was carrying or a note that he was unarmed. The lists cover the first 276 folios and the remaining seven folios are a ‘breviate’ or summary of the whole book. Most of the men who mustered were English and Scottish settlers and, in the absence of comprehensive parish and estate records, the muster roll is the nearest one has to a census of the British population of early seventeenth-century Ulster.

In the late 1960s or early 1970s Robert Hunter began a project to publish each section of the muster. William Copeland Trimble had published the muster roll for county Fermanagh in the History of Enniskillen in 1919, and T.G.F. Paterson had published that for county Armagh in 1970. Robert therefore began with the muster roll for county Donegal, which he published in 1972, and in 1978 he and Michael Perceval-Maxwell collaborated on an edition of the muster roll for county Cavan. The muster roll for county Fermanagh seems to have been the next section which Robert intended to publish, but for whatever reason he put the project into abeyance and did not resume working on it until 1998. Over the following years he collated material for counties Antrim, Down, and Londonderry and had begun working on the muster rolls for counties Monaghan and Tyrone shortly before his death in 2007.

Scottish Record Society

The Scottish Record Society is one of Scotland’s oldest historical societies, and is dedicated to publishing calendars, indexes and texts of historical records.

It aims to promote the study of the historical records of Scotland by commissioning and editing works of appropriate significance, and by the publication of approved and contextualised original documents and of calendars and indices of public records and private muniments relating to Scotland of value to historians and genealogists.

The Gravestone Photographic Resource

The Gravestone Photographic Resource project is an attempt to provide a much needed free on-line resource for family historians and other researchers.

The GPR is run by Charles Sale. He set it up in 1998 and has written all the code and database routines used by the website.

The Tudor Fiants

A ‘fiant’ was a warrant by the deputy or council to the Irish Chancery to prepare letters-patent—published written orders to convey a right, an office, title to property or a pardon. The Fiants are statements of command. The term comes from the first word of the customary opening protocol in these documents: Fiant litterae patentes (‘Let letters patents be made’).

The Irish Fiants don’t survive as a series until Tudor times. (The medieval chancery warrants have survived in sufficient quantities that Irish fiants are one of the ‘categories of substitute material’ used by TCD’s CIRCLE project to reconstruct the rolls of the medieval Irish Chancery.) From 1875, Calendars of the Irish Fiants from 1521 to 1603 were published in the Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office. In 1994 this material was compiled into four volumes and re-published as Irish Fiants of the Tudor sovereigns (De Búrca, Dublin).
Even though the Tudor Fiants are widely available to researchers, they remain an under-used source. Yet they provide detailed evidence for family historians who want to trace Gaelic and Old English families, or to delve into the origin and history of family names and place-names in Ireland.