Tuesday, 22 September 2015

Kilrush Board of Guardians Minute Books, 1849

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=5947&awinaffid=123532&clickref=&p=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.findmypast.ie%2Fsearch-world-Records%2Fclare-poor-law-unions-board-of-guardians-minute-booksAt the tail end of June, FindMyPast released a collection of more than 63,000 Board of Guardians' Minute Books from two of County Clare's eight Poor Law Unions (Kilrush and Ennistymon unions). See my original blogpost for details.

Each record contains an image of the original handwritten minutes and a transcript, which doesn't necessarily include the full details of the corresponding entry. I found this to be a huge problem, mainly because my patience with awful handwriting is limited, and I tend to not perservere on purely speculative explorations of a resource.

Talking with Clare Library's Local Studies team on a different matter a few days ago, I was surprised to learn that the Kilrush Union Minute Books for 1849 have been fully transcribed and are available free of charge at the County Clare Library website. Also available is a very useful and detailed Introduction to the material by Ciaran Ó Murchadha.

So, if you're interested in the Kilrush books for 1849, you can get the best of both worlds by using the Index on FindMyPast to direct you to entries of interest, and then locate them by date in the Clare transcriptions.