Wednesday 26 August 2015

Update on Limerick Museum's Local History Resources

A little follow up to last month's blogpost regarding the excellent collection of resources and finding aids available at Limerick Museum's Local History Resources section of the Limerick.ie website...

Acting Museum Curator Brian Hodkinson has been in touch with Irish Genealogy News to recommend that researchers should use the online catalogue in addition to the site's Research Aids for Places and People. There's good reason, as his example shows: "We recently received a set of papers from an estate office, and some of the documents covered counties Clare and Tipperary. While the Limerick names in them will be extracted in due course to appear in our 'Estates List of County Limerick' database, those relating to Tipp and Clare will not. However, if you type Clonbrick [Co Clare] into our catalogue you should find a small group of names that were included in one of the documents relating to living conditions."

The catalogue was also recently updated with details from a rental, possibly from Stafford O'Brien's estate (Brian isn't certain), which lists tenants in Owneybeg barony in Co. Limerick (95 names) as well as in locations near Tipperary Town (150 names).

Brian advises that he has now completed his (pdf) list of Bengal officers from counties Limerick and Clare. Most of the entries include place of origin in Ireland and details of marriages and children of men who joined the East India Company between 1758 and 1834; their career/life details may continue up to the 1860s. Could be very useful for some researchers!