Return of Owners of Land, 1876
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What is this record collection and where can you access it?
You can thank the curious Earl of Derby for the existence of this resource as apparently in 1872 he mused in the House of Lords about how many people owned how much of the British Isles (maybe he had a bet with another peer that he owned more?!) Anyway, by 1876, Local Government officers had beavered away to produce Returns of Land Owners (of 1 acre or more) for all the constituent nations.
For Ireland, see Land Owners in Ireland, 1876 which you can find indexed for free on the excellent Failte Romhat site. The files are presented by county and there is a scrollable index of names and a PDF of the original page images. You can also download the entire document from the Internet Archive - click on the link or the image to the left.
One word of advice from personal experience - if your relative lived close to a county boundary, be sure to check the files for the neighbouring county as they may have held land over the county border too. Note too that the address of the land-owner could be elsewhere in Ireland so you are not necessarily going to learn which bits of land they owned in the given county, just the total acreage. However, for the addresses within the actual county, they perhaps did live on at least part of their own properties?
You can thank the curious Earl of Derby for the existence of this resource as apparently in 1872 he mused in the House of Lords about how many people owned how much of the British Isles (maybe he had a bet with another peer that he owned more?!) Anyway, by 1876, Local Government officers had beavered away to produce Returns of Land Owners (of 1 acre or more) for all the constituent nations.
For Ireland, see Land Owners in Ireland, 1876 which you can find indexed for free on the excellent Failte Romhat site. The files are presented by county and there is a scrollable index of names and a PDF of the original page images. You can also download the entire document from the Internet Archive - click on the link or the image to the left.
One word of advice from personal experience - if your relative lived close to a county boundary, be sure to check the files for the neighbouring county as they may have held land over the county border too. Note too that the address of the land-owner could be elsewhere in Ireland so you are not necessarily going to learn which bits of land they owned in the given county, just the total acreage. However, for the addresses within the actual county, they perhaps did live on at least part of their own properties?
How do you work forwards or backwards from a record in this source?
The most obvious place to check back to is Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864 for either the named individual or the townland or parish to see if this is a continuation record for the same person or have they acquired the land in the intervening period (Check the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+ for that information.) However, something struck me when carefully checking the remits of these different sources - Griffith's Valuation (eventually) applied to all tenements that yielded an annual income of £3 or more whilst the Return of Land Owners applied to land holdings of 1 acre or more with varying estimates of the value of the return, so there might be the potential for areas of unproductive land to be in the latter but not the former perhaps? I can't say I've definitively proven this theory so let me know if you find any examples.
The owners of the biggest areas of land in any county (usually the aristocracy) are likely to be the Grantors of leases, so the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds should yield entries for them.
The most obvious place to check back to is Griffith's Valuation, 1847-1864 for either the named individual or the townland or parish to see if this is a continuation record for the same person or have they acquired the land in the intervening period (Check the Valuation Revision Books, 1847-1864+ for that information.) However, something struck me when carefully checking the remits of these different sources - Griffith's Valuation (eventually) applied to all tenements that yielded an annual income of £3 or more whilst the Return of Land Owners applied to land holdings of 1 acre or more with varying estimates of the value of the return, so there might be the potential for areas of unproductive land to be in the latter but not the former perhaps? I can't say I've definitively proven this theory so let me know if you find any examples.
The owners of the biggest areas of land in any county (usually the aristocracy) are likely to be the Grantors of leases, so the Registry of Deeds Memorial Deeds should yield entries for them.
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2022
