Announcement: Irish Quaker records on Findmypast.ie

Christopher Moriarty, Curator, Friends Historical Library Dublin

The month of March 2017 saw the completion of a revolutionary development in the Irish Quaker archives. Written and copied by hand for centuries, the great majority were unique documents with little done in the way of indexing. That changed when the serial documents and many others began to be scanned. The initiative came from the firm Eneclann and, in particular, its Director Brian Donovan. Likely to be used mainly by genealogists, the records provide a wealth of detail on local, national and international history. Half a million pages, with a name index of more than a million and a half entries, are now available to readers worldwide on the website Findmypast.ie—available and secure beyond the wildest imagination of early Friends.

In 1654 William Edmundson organised the first Quaker Meeting in Ireland. A forceful character, Edmundson was one of the leaders of the movement, which attracted some thousands of members. The great majority were recent English settlers and Meetings were established throughout the English-speaking communities in the three Provinces of Ulster, Leinster and Munster.

George Fox toured Ireland in 1669, in the company of Edmundson and others. This marks the ‘settling’ of Meetings and the initiation of meticulous keeping of records. Minutes of national, provincial and local meetings date to the following year, 1670, with a small number of transcripts of events from the 1650s. Births, marriages and deaths were duly recorded together with disownments and ‘removals’ from one meeting to another.

The basic records are the Minutes of national, provincial and local meetings which provide details on the formation of Meetings and the building of Meeting Houses as well as on the activities of the Meetings as a whole and of active individuals. Registers of births, marriages and deaths provide comprehensive basic data of individuals and their relationships. In addition, manuscript pedigrees of the major Quaker families, compiled by Thomas Henry Webb early in the 20th century, are included. Printed lists of names and addresses, issued at intervals since 1837 provide information on the residences of Irish Friends.

The term ‘removal’, describing transfer of membership from one regional ‘Monthly Meeting’ to another, records both movements within Ireland and emigration, with details of the great numbers who travelled to North America. Disownments in Ireland, which happily came to an end in the 1860s, numbered some seven thousand. Volumes of particular interest to historians include ‘Sufferings’ and Parliamentary Committees. The majority of the former refer to seizure of farm produce and household goods from Quakers who refused to pay tithes to the Established Church. The latter includes papers on submissions to Parliament, mostly for relief from discriminatory laws.

The final dataset to be added to the website was the Irish Quaker Historical Database. This has some forty-six thousand references to documents held in the Friends Historical Library, Dublin. They range from books, through pamphlets to personal letters and cover concerns ranging from the health of individual infants to the wellbeing of the entire human race.