Local History

Clearly there are many ways you can approach Local History. The excellent book edited by Raymond Gillespie and Myrtle Hill on Doing Irish Local History: Pursuit and Practice, published by the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University of Belfast in 1998 is just one of a number of publications which provide guidance on such matters

When I investigate the history of a locality (and by locality I mean a group of townlands in the countryside, a village or a town) I'm looking for evidence on the people who lived there at various times in the past, what they did for a living, what the area was like in the past and how it changed over time. The end product of these studies may be something that is written up in continuous prose, or it may just be a collection of sources and databases such as the material I have gathered together on Ballymoney. In the past I would have used this material to illustrate particular themes within my academic work in social and economic history. Now, I just do it out of curiosity. Below I have outlined the way I go about gathering the evidence.

In a town I tend to begin with a street and in the countryside with a townland, moving out from these focal points to encompass an area which in some way forms a locality and community which is of a size that it is manageable in terms of working with sources.

I use much the same sources for both town and countryside and, even if I do not know a street or a townland, I proceed something like this.

• I find out which Barony, Civil Parish, Poor Law Union and  District Electoral Division (DED) it belonged to. I will need this information when I go looking for historical records.
   
• I get the six-inch Ordnance Survey Maps covering the 1830s, c.1860, c1905 and c.1930s. In towns I get the large-scale maps of the towns for similar dates
   
• I get a copy of the Griffith's Printed Valuation of circa 1860 plus the Valuation Map that accompanies it. This allows me to people the townland or street at that time and have an idea of where each family lives, who are the farmers and who are the cottiers, etc..in the countryside. For towns, I also look at the street directories, particularly for the period 1846 to 1864. I database these, which means that I can usually match them up with Griffith's which means that I know where people lived in the town and their occupation or profession.

I now have a choice - I can go back from 1860 to say the 1830s or I can go forward towards the 1900s and the present day. In most instances I choose the latter.

• I then look at the Census Enumerators' Returns of 1901 and 1911 which give detailed information on all members of the family living in each house in those years, and, the Revisions to the Griffith's Valuation dating from 1864 and running through to the 1930s which note changes in the occupiers of houses and land during that period. I have mentioned these together because I often move from one to the other and sometimes I begin with Griffith's and sometimes with the Census Returns. I usually create databases from the surnames which makes it easier for me to find people and cross-reference them. I also database more of the street directories c.1900.
   
• If there are some families that I want more detail on, I consult the appropriate church registers of baptisms, burials and marriages. If necessary, I consult the civil registers.
   
• At this point I will have a good deal of information on the families who lived in the street or townland between 1860 and circa 1930. The story from 1930 to the present can usually be filled out by people living in the town or townland today. A visit at this point to talk to older inhabitants is probably better than going at an earlier time. By this stage I have information on the place and showing it to people can jog their memory, and, some of the oral information relating to the past will make more sense to me.
   
• I search for other sources which will allow me to to gain a better understanding of the social and economic life of the area and what it looked like during the period. Clearly, photographs provide the best evidence of what a place looked like in the past. Whilst there are plenty of photographs of the countryside in general, it is often difficult to get any relating to a specific townland or group of townlands. Usually more photographs of particular towns survive. Sources such as emigrant letters, estate records containing rental and agent's correspondence with the landlord, reports of parliamentary commissions, newspaper, etc. provide me with some evidence of social and economic life not only in the relatively small area that I am studying but also in the wider region of which it is a part.

I then turn my attention to the period before 1860.  As with family history, going back to the first half of the nineteenth century, and indeed earlier, is perhaps more difficult. Nevertheless, I still try to try to find out who was living there in the first half of the nineteenth century and what life was like for them.

• Sources such as the Ordnance Survey Memoirs for the 1830s, parliamentary commissions and reports, travellers' accounts, etc. provide me with more general information on what life in the area was like at that time. This was a period when there was great interest in England on what was going on in Ireland, so many private individuals and officials were writing about it.
   
• It is more difficult to identify all of the families who lived in an area at that time. My web site Sources for the Study of Family and Local History in Ballymoney will show you the sources which give lists of names for this earlier period. Most of the sources listed in the site will be available for other areas in the province but there are some, such as the lists of inhabitants which accompany the early town maps of Ballymoney, which are particular to that town.
   
• However, a word of caution. I usually find people in the Tithe Applotment Books whose names are familiar to me but, without evidence from parish registers, it is often difficult to be sure about their relationship to others with the same name, or to persons that I managed to identify in the later years of the nineteenth century. Church registers are necessary to establish relationships between people but, unfortunately, they can be very patchy for this period.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are very interesting periods but, as in most earlier periods of history, the sources are not as extensive and are often more difficult to decipher and interpret, not least because they belong to a very different historical period. But, where sources are available for a particular locality, studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be very rewarding. Again the same word of caution, mentioned above, regarding the recognition of surnames.

As an exercise, you could apply the above procedure to the sources in the web site - Sources for the Study of Family and Local History in Ballymoney.

You can see what I found out about my townland, Forttown, about two miles outside the town of Ballymoney, in the book Townlands in Ulster: Local History Studies edited by W. H. Crawford & R. H. Foy, published by Ulster Historical Foundation in association with the Federation of Ulster Local Studies in 1998.