- UK & Ireland, Nursing Registers, 1898-1968 This collection holds 1.6million entries and many thousand of them are Irish women (and some men) reporting their home addresses in Ireland.
- UK & Ireland, Queen's Nursing Institute Roll of Nurses, 1891-1931 This roll includes nearly 11,000 names.
- Scotland, Nursing Applications, 1921-1945 This record set holds nearly 13,000 entries, including just over 100 entries for women reporting an address in Ireland.
My great aunt Rosanne appears three times in the Nursing Register, showing that she studied at the Dreadnought Hospital in Greenwich, London from 1934 to 1937, qualifying by examination prior to her registration as a nurse on 19 March 1937. The 1940 register records the family home in Bagenalstown, County Carlow, as her permanent address. Three years later, the register shows her living in Surbiton Hill in Surrey, England, and in 1946 she is living at the same address but she is recorded under both her maiden and new married surname. That's a pretty good chunk of information.
I knew Rosanne quite well but hadn't realised she'd trained at the Dreadnought. Her elder sister, Hester, had also studied there but she had a cardiac arrest during an emergency operation to remove her appendix when she was just 26. She was a second-year student when she died, so Hester doesn't figure in these registers of fully qualified nurses. I can't help wondering if Rosanne had any choice in her place of training. It can't have been easy at 22 years of age to leave Ireland to live and work in the building and operating theatre where her elder sister had died only a few years previously.