Monday 11 February 2019

CSORP collection: cataloguing of 1832 papers completed

http://csorp.nationalarchives.ie/The National Archives of Ireland has catalogued some 7,856 files from the year 1832 in its Chief Secretary's Office Registered Papers (CSORP) collection. This was a year when a cholera epidemic caused great distress, and the Tithe War – a campaign of civil disobedience in which the Roman Catholic majority refused to pay the tithe that maintained the Protestant Church of Ireland – was increasingly gathering support and violent unrest was becoming more frequent.

As of this morning, the catalogued entries have not been uploaded to the dedicated CSORP website (click logo above), where they will join those for 1818–1830, but if you're eager to explore them, you can use the NAI's main search engine by using 'cso/rp/1832' as a keyword.

The CSORP collection is one of Ireland's most valuable archives of original source material for the 19th and early-20th centuries. The records comprise mainly letters, petitions (for employment, funds, criminal sentence leniency etc), memorials, affidavits, recommendations and reports. Some of is official government correspondence; some is unofficial correspondence from private citizens. While the archive is primarily of interest to political, social and economic historians, some of the papers will be of interest to genealogists and local historians.

Digitisation of the project has been funded by a bequest from the late Professor Francis J Crowley, a professor at the University of California and son of Irish-born parents. Work started in September 2008 and is on-going.

The papers are available for consultation in the NAI's Reading Room at Bishop Street, Dublin 8.