Irish Land Commission
(Click to access document)
Don't get too excited, as I'm afraid that the Irish Land Commission, set up in 1881 and tasked with redistributing land right up until its dissolution in the 1990's, is not giving up its treasure any time soon. Their records, which by all accounts are a veritable gold mine of genealogical information, are now held in custody in a warehouse in Portlaiose by the Irish Department of Agriculture. By all accounts, they are regarded as "private property", not records of State.
John Grenham waxed lyrical about the situation in his blog piece "Land Commission's Forbidden Fruit" - follow up the link to the Irish Government's brisk 2012 response to efforts to gain access. He also blogged recently about one lucky researcher's success in gaining access and the resulting book - "The Lost Gaeltacht". Fiona Fitzsimmons made the case for more access in this History Ireland "Irish Land Commission" article 6 years ago.
However, late in 2021 there was a surprising announcement that moves were afoot to consider at least digitising the findings aids. The Irish Times carried a couple of stories, including a short video (see my blog post.) The budgets being talked about are tiny and the timescales glacial and as for any similar plans for the actual records themselves - who knows? Not in this lifetime or the next, predicts an animated John Grenham! There are not even any firm promises to put the digitised finding aids online. Mind you, imagine knowing that there were more detailed records available and not a hope of accessing them!
Curiously though, pre-1923 records for the Northern Irish Ulster counties were transferred to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and they have had no problems making them publicly available (no specific web page - you have to search their e-catalogue with the phrase "Land Commission" to find the 2000+ references.)
So, good news if you have land-owning ancestors in Ulster but bad news if they were in the Republic, like mine.
The document you can access for free by clicking the image above is a bit of a dense read but gives you a flavour of how this institution sought to bring some order to proceedings. It also gives lots of clues as to the myriad of documents that might be produced in the course of executing land transactions according to their rules.
John Grenham waxed lyrical about the situation in his blog piece "Land Commission's Forbidden Fruit" - follow up the link to the Irish Government's brisk 2012 response to efforts to gain access. He also blogged recently about one lucky researcher's success in gaining access and the resulting book - "The Lost Gaeltacht". Fiona Fitzsimmons made the case for more access in this History Ireland "Irish Land Commission" article 6 years ago.
However, late in 2021 there was a surprising announcement that moves were afoot to consider at least digitising the findings aids. The Irish Times carried a couple of stories, including a short video (see my blog post.) The budgets being talked about are tiny and the timescales glacial and as for any similar plans for the actual records themselves - who knows? Not in this lifetime or the next, predicts an animated John Grenham! There are not even any firm promises to put the digitised finding aids online. Mind you, imagine knowing that there were more detailed records available and not a hope of accessing them!
Curiously though, pre-1923 records for the Northern Irish Ulster counties were transferred to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and they have had no problems making them publicly available (no specific web page - you have to search their e-catalogue with the phrase "Land Commission" to find the 2000+ references.)
So, good news if you have land-owning ancestors in Ulster but bad news if they were in the Republic, like mine.
The document you can access for free by clicking the image above is a bit of a dense read but gives you a flavour of how this institution sought to bring some order to proceedings. It also gives lots of clues as to the myriad of documents that might be produced in the course of executing land transactions according to their rules.
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2021
