Wednesday 23 March 2016

County Tipperary folklore joins Schools' Collection

http://www.duchas.ie/
The National Folklore Commission's online platform DĂșchas.ie has published the Schools' Collection material for County Tipperary.

More than 200 schools across the county took part in the folklore project back in 1937–1939, which saw pupils gather folklore and local history stories from their parents and grandparents and other members of their local communities.

The Schools' Collection consists, in total, of more than half a million pages of folklore material recorded by about 50,000 primary school children across the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. The entire collection will be available at DĂșchas.ie by the end of the year but more than half of it – from Counties Dublin, Mayo, Donegal, Waterford, Galway, Leitrim, Kildare, Kerry, Sligo, Limerick, Monaghan, Laois, Kilkenny and Louth, and now Tipperary – is already online. The collections are free to access.

The site is of interest to many specialist researchers including genealogists (the children had to record the name, address and age of their 'informant', many of whom were born in the second half of the 19th century), local historians, archaeologists and linguists, and any general historian exploring traditional life in Ireland.