Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864
What is this record collection and when was it published?
Let's start with the man. Sir Richard Griffith [1784-1878] was engaged to survey all of Ireland with respect to boundaries and land values in the 1820's as Ireland attempted to reform local taxation and later implement the Poor Law rate. He was in fact a geologist and was keenly interested in the quality of the agricultural land in order to arrive at his valuations. He strictly managed a team of valuers who scoured the country gathering the requisite information, which they recorded in working notebooks of various formats and on annotated working maps.
The work took many years and was subject to changes in methodology that meant revisiting previously surveyed counties and there were also many lengthy appeals lodged. Eventually, the results started to be published on a county by county basis to form what is more correctly known as the Primary Valuation of Ireland, but has become labelled more colloquially as Griffith's Valuation (GV).
It is very important to note the publication date for any county as the data could have been gathered over a period of many years before this date and all later updates will have to be searched for elsewhere (See Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+.) Most of the dates below come from Claire Santry's useful GV Publication Dates map on her website. This also illustrates how the valuers roughly worked their way anti-clockwise around the country (although 1851 for Co. Tyrone appears to be a bit out of step with the neighbouring counties on the map?)
Let's start with the man. Sir Richard Griffith [1784-1878] was engaged to survey all of Ireland with respect to boundaries and land values in the 1820's as Ireland attempted to reform local taxation and later implement the Poor Law rate. He was in fact a geologist and was keenly interested in the quality of the agricultural land in order to arrive at his valuations. He strictly managed a team of valuers who scoured the country gathering the requisite information, which they recorded in working notebooks of various formats and on annotated working maps.
The work took many years and was subject to changes in methodology that meant revisiting previously surveyed counties and there were also many lengthy appeals lodged. Eventually, the results started to be published on a county by county basis to form what is more correctly known as the Primary Valuation of Ireland, but has become labelled more colloquially as Griffith's Valuation (GV).
It is very important to note the publication date for any county as the data could have been gathered over a period of many years before this date and all later updates will have to be searched for elsewhere (See Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+.) Most of the dates below come from Claire Santry's useful GV Publication Dates map on her website. This also illustrates how the valuers roughly worked their way anti-clockwise around the country (although 1851 for Co. Tyrone appears to be a bit out of step with the neighbouring counties on the map?)
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John Grenham published a neat little trick to getting to Griffith's Valuation volume title pages on his blog, which you can also use to check publication dates when you find a page of interest on AskAboutIreland (see below.) With a little help from a kind correspondent, this is how I arrived at the proposed revised date above of 1860 for Co. Tyrone.
Click to go to publisher
Where can you find out more about this resource?
Many of the original working documents and published volumes survive and are deposited with either the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) or the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Whilst the latter was supposed to receive all of the relevant documents for the 6 counties of the newly formed territory, I gather that the process was not perfectly executed and NAI still has some documents it should have handed over.
However, NAI has digitised and published some of what it does hold (more details below) and also has a good short Guide to the archives of the Valuation Office, which I recommend you read. If you want a more in-depth commentary, then "The Archives of the Valuation of Ireland" by Francis McGee would appear to be the definitive guide to this resource, as she was an archivist at the NAI working with these records for many years.
I haven't been able to lay my hands on a copy of this book yet, but I did manage to find a recording of a talk she gave on the subject to the Genealogical Society of Ireland entitled "The 19th Century Valuation of Ireland." It's quite a long talk at over an hour and the sound quality is not great but she goes into a lot of detail with examples. From these, you should be able to get a good understanding of the different types of documents in the complete archive, how they relate to each other and how to interpret all the information that exists within them.
Many of the original working documents and published volumes survive and are deposited with either the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) or the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Whilst the latter was supposed to receive all of the relevant documents for the 6 counties of the newly formed territory, I gather that the process was not perfectly executed and NAI still has some documents it should have handed over.
However, NAI has digitised and published some of what it does hold (more details below) and also has a good short Guide to the archives of the Valuation Office, which I recommend you read. If you want a more in-depth commentary, then "The Archives of the Valuation of Ireland" by Francis McGee would appear to be the definitive guide to this resource, as she was an archivist at the NAI working with these records for many years.
I haven't been able to lay my hands on a copy of this book yet, but I did manage to find a recording of a talk she gave on the subject to the Genealogical Society of Ireland entitled "The 19th Century Valuation of Ireland." It's quite a long talk at over an hour and the sound quality is not great but she goes into a lot of detail with examples. From these, you should be able to get a good understanding of the different types of documents in the complete archive, how they relate to each other and how to interpret all the information that exists within them.
Where can you access these records online?
Primary Valuation Books
These were first published as printed volumes available for public inspection and it is pages from these that have been scanned and indexed on a number of commercial websites,
However, if you want free access to transcripts, original page images and maps then the Ask about Ireland Griffith's Valuation is the best site to use. You can search by name or by place and there are some good help pages on the same site. The search interface is a bit unforgiving and you will have to plug away with different variants of place names for example as wild cards are not implemented. Be sure to read their advice on using the Valuation and maps carefully, including the 2 links to how to do a place name search and how to do a family name search.
Valuation Office Books
The original working notebooks, of varying formats, also make for interesting reading as you may find notes made by the valuers that did not make it into the final documents, as they did not have any bearing on the tax to be paid. However, from a genealogical point of view you may learn about occupations or changes in tenancies. For towns, there may be additional details such as small sketch maps. The original pages are quite scribbled on in places and may be difficult to read and you are going to need to be patient and diligent in assembling evidence across the different formats for your ancestors.
There are a few places you can access surviving records online - choose whichever one you like searching or have a subscription to.
Primary Valuation Books
These were first published as printed volumes available for public inspection and it is pages from these that have been scanned and indexed on a number of commercial websites,
- Griffith's Valuation 1847-1864 (FMP=£) They claim to have the most complete collection but I cannot verify this.
- Ireland, Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1964 (Anc=£)
- RootsIreland (£) There are only transcripts on this site, no images.
However, if you want free access to transcripts, original page images and maps then the Ask about Ireland Griffith's Valuation is the best site to use. You can search by name or by place and there are some good help pages on the same site. The search interface is a bit unforgiving and you will have to plug away with different variants of place names for example as wild cards are not implemented. Be sure to read their advice on using the Valuation and maps carefully, including the 2 links to how to do a place name search and how to do a family name search.
Valuation Office Books
The original working notebooks, of varying formats, also make for interesting reading as you may find notes made by the valuers that did not make it into the final documents, as they did not have any bearing on the tax to be paid. However, from a genealogical point of view you may learn about occupations or changes in tenancies. For towns, there may be additional details such as small sketch maps. The original pages are quite scribbled on in places and may be difficult to read and you are going to need to be patient and diligent in assembling evidence across the different formats for your ancestors.
There are a few places you can access surviving records online - choose whichever one you like searching or have a subscription to.
- Ireland, Valuation Office Books, 1831-1856 (FamilySearch) Indexed and also available to browse by place.
- Valuation Office Books, 1824-1856 (NAI) Be sure to read the notes carefully before searching, as these explain the different notebooks.
- Ireland Valuation Office Books (FMP=£) This is the same collection as the free records from the NAI above.
- Ireland, Valuation Records, 1824-1825 (Anc=£) Again, this would appear mirror the free NAI collection.
What can you expect to find in the records?
I must confess that thus far I have had most experience of consulting the Primary Valuations and have not been as successful with wrangling the Valuation Office Books for my own or clients' research. Therefore, I shall limit my comments and advice to the final published documents for now.
There are several excellent articles online that explain the history and composition of these records in much more detail - e.g. John Grenham for Ask about Ireland, Claire Santry's Griffith's Valuation pages and a paper by James Reilly on the Leitrim-Roscommon genealogy page.
Briefly, the records are organised by townlands within parishes within baronies within counties, listing the current occupier and from whom they directly leased the land if they did not own it themselves. There will also be a very general description of the land (tenement) in a few words (House, Land, Yard, Offices (i.e. outbuildings), Garden etc.), its extent in statute acres(A), roods(R) and perches(P) and an indication of the estimated annual income for taxation purposes. There will also be a map reference - more on that below. For a quick reference to the language used, see FindMyPast's explanation of the terms.
Things to look out for;
I must confess that thus far I have had most experience of consulting the Primary Valuations and have not been as successful with wrangling the Valuation Office Books for my own or clients' research. Therefore, I shall limit my comments and advice to the final published documents for now.
There are several excellent articles online that explain the history and composition of these records in much more detail - e.g. John Grenham for Ask about Ireland, Claire Santry's Griffith's Valuation pages and a paper by James Reilly on the Leitrim-Roscommon genealogy page.
Briefly, the records are organised by townlands within parishes within baronies within counties, listing the current occupier and from whom they directly leased the land if they did not own it themselves. There will also be a very general description of the land (tenement) in a few words (House, Land, Yard, Offices (i.e. outbuildings), Garden etc.), its extent in statute acres(A), roods(R) and perches(P) and an indication of the estimated annual income for taxation purposes. There will also be a map reference - more on that below. For a quick reference to the language used, see FindMyPast's explanation of the terms.
Things to look out for;
- Your relative may appear as an "Immediate Lessor".
- This might be an aristocratic land owning family e.g. "Earl Fitzwilliam" for example. Else look out for repeated names in an area to perhaps indicate someone with many interests in a place or town.
- Many large land-holders delegated the leasing of their land through land-agents who handled the sub-letting of smaller plots, so you may find that the repeated names are in fact these men.
- Your relative may also have sub-let a small section of their leased land to others for subsistence purposes and you will generally find them listed as a tenant and then as a lessor immediately below.
- There may be no Immediate Lessor listed and instead you may find legal terms such as "In Fee" (owned outright) or "In Chancery" (subject to a current legal process.)
- If the tenant is listed as "Reps. of {name}", then the last land holder named may have died and his estate was being looked after by his administrators or executors - try to hunt for a burial or monumental inscription nearby in the preceding years to publication.
- One person's land holdings might have been spread around a parish or even in the neighbouring county - look out for the tenement that has a house built on it for where your relative actually lived as the other holdings may just be fields ... or in the case of one of my ancestors, most of a mountain in Co. Wicklow!
Contemporary map for Griffith's Valuations - www.askaboutireland.ie
Where can I locate the land holding on a map?
The best place I've found for viewing the maps is on Ask about Ireland. In the far left columns of each printed page of the published valuations, each record will have a map reference associated with it consisting of a number and optionally a letter. This refers to a plot marked on an Ordnance Survey of Ireland (OSI) Sheet Number, which you should be able to find referenced somewhere on the page, perhaps under one of the townland or street names as "{Ord. S. #}".
On the record results page, chose one of the map view icons and you will be able to zoom in on historical maps. Click on the image to the left and you can see a bigger version that illustrates some of the features I mention below.
The map will initially show quite a large area, with the presumption that the plot you seek is roughly in the middle of the screen. The townlands are outlined in thick red lines and the land holdings within them outlined in fainter red lines. These are the referenced plots and should be numbered accordingly. A useful tip to orientate yourself is to use the slider at the top right of the screen to temporarily merge a modern map with the historical one.
Unfortunately, you will have to squint a bit at the underlying faint text to make sure you're looking at the right townland and the maps are littered with parish names writ large in bigger fonts too. However, you will be able to see the detail of buildings, field boundaries, roads etc.
Another useful feature are the Town Plans. Switch these on by clicking on "Show Town Plans" on the right hand side and small house icons will pop up. Click on these and sketch maps of the towns will appear in another window. Not every town has a map but if the town you are interested in has one, be sure to take a look.
Note, that although these maps accompany the Primary Valuation which was published between 1847 and 1864, they are believed to be a bit older (latter decades of the 19th Century.) This might mean that you struggle to find some of the reference numbers but I've had success with most of the ones I've searched for and this is a wonderful free resource.
Find My Past does have a separate collection entitled Griffith's Surveys Maps and Plans, 1847-1864 (FMP=£) which apparently contains the original maps used by the valuers complete with some edge annotations. However, personally, I have struggled to use these as they are very faint black and white images. Curiously the collection is indexed by place name, including streets in major towns, but the map images I have tried to view are at far too large a scale to identify where they are? Well, at least that was my experience with Kilkenny and Wicklow, but if anyone else has more success than me with this collection, then be sure to let me know!
The best place I've found for viewing the maps is on Ask about Ireland. In the far left columns of each printed page of the published valuations, each record will have a map reference associated with it consisting of a number and optionally a letter. This refers to a plot marked on an Ordnance Survey of Ireland (OSI) Sheet Number, which you should be able to find referenced somewhere on the page, perhaps under one of the townland or street names as "{Ord. S. #}".
On the record results page, chose one of the map view icons and you will be able to zoom in on historical maps. Click on the image to the left and you can see a bigger version that illustrates some of the features I mention below.
The map will initially show quite a large area, with the presumption that the plot you seek is roughly in the middle of the screen. The townlands are outlined in thick red lines and the land holdings within them outlined in fainter red lines. These are the referenced plots and should be numbered accordingly. A useful tip to orientate yourself is to use the slider at the top right of the screen to temporarily merge a modern map with the historical one.
Unfortunately, you will have to squint a bit at the underlying faint text to make sure you're looking at the right townland and the maps are littered with parish names writ large in bigger fonts too. However, you will be able to see the detail of buildings, field boundaries, roads etc.
Another useful feature are the Town Plans. Switch these on by clicking on "Show Town Plans" on the right hand side and small house icons will pop up. Click on these and sketch maps of the towns will appear in another window. Not every town has a map but if the town you are interested in has one, be sure to take a look.
Note, that although these maps accompany the Primary Valuation which was published between 1847 and 1864, they are believed to be a bit older (latter decades of the 19th Century.) This might mean that you struggle to find some of the reference numbers but I've had success with most of the ones I've searched for and this is a wonderful free resource.
Find My Past does have a separate collection entitled Griffith's Surveys Maps and Plans, 1847-1864 (FMP=£) which apparently contains the original maps used by the valuers complete with some edge annotations. However, personally, I have struggled to use these as they are very faint black and white images. Curiously the collection is indexed by place name, including streets in major towns, but the map images I have tried to view are at far too large a scale to identify where they are? Well, at least that was my experience with Kilkenny and Wicklow, but if anyone else has more success than me with this collection, then be sure to let me know!
How should you work forwards or backwards from Griffith's Valuation?
The most obvious next collection to work forward into are the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+, which I have written about on the Valuation Office page. This is where you will find out whether the land stayed in the family or was sold off or the leases not renewed. Unfortunately, you won't find out easily if your relatives acquired new lands or leases as names are not indexed, but you could try exploring the wider parish to see if you can find anything.
If you cannot access the Revision Books, then try exploring the Return of Land Owners, 1876, to see if the same person is named, again carefully bearing in mind the publication date for the county because the gap could be up to 30 years.
To establish how long the land has been in the family try working back into the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds, either via the Grantors indexes searching on the Immediate Lessors' names or perhaps more successfully, via the townland indexes.
The Tithe Applotment Books, 1823-1837 were compiled approximately 20-40 years prior to Griffith's Valuation (GV), depending upon when the county valuation was published and / or had the tithe responsibilities recorded. So, notwithstanding the Names Health Warning I gave you, is it the same person in both sources or was it their father or grandfather? If a woman is listed for a small sub-let plot in a townland, could she be a widow and her now deceased husband was listed as liable for the tithe on a larger plot previously?
The most obvious next collection to work forward into are the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+, which I have written about on the Valuation Office page. This is where you will find out whether the land stayed in the family or was sold off or the leases not renewed. Unfortunately, you won't find out easily if your relatives acquired new lands or leases as names are not indexed, but you could try exploring the wider parish to see if you can find anything.
If you cannot access the Revision Books, then try exploring the Return of Land Owners, 1876, to see if the same person is named, again carefully bearing in mind the publication date for the county because the gap could be up to 30 years.
To establish how long the land has been in the family try working back into the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds, either via the Grantors indexes searching on the Immediate Lessors' names or perhaps more successfully, via the townland indexes.
The Tithe Applotment Books, 1823-1837 were compiled approximately 20-40 years prior to Griffith's Valuation (GV), depending upon when the county valuation was published and / or had the tithe responsibilities recorded. So, notwithstanding the Names Health Warning I gave you, is it the same person in both sources or was it their father or grandfather? If a woman is listed for a small sub-let plot in a townland, could she be a widow and her now deceased husband was listed as liable for the tithe on a larger plot previously?
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2023
