The Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) has announced the inauguration of its Wallace Clare Award, through which it intends to celebrate outstanding, long-term contributions to the development of Irish genealogy worldwide. In this initial year, the award is being presented to four recipients, all of whom have made a significant impact on aspects of the study of the genealogy of the people and diaspora of Ireland.
Clockwise from top left: Marie E Daly, Guillermo MacLoughlin, William Delmar O’Ryan, and Christina Hunt. Click composte image to find out more about each of the recipients |
Reflecting the global spread of Irishness, two of the recipients are from the USA and one is from Argentina. The fourth is honoured posthumously for a major one-name study that involved records from many countries.
The four inaugural recipients are Marie E. Daly, from Massachusetts; Christina Hunt, from Pennsylvania; Guillermo MacLoughlin, from Buenos Aires; and the late William D. O’Ryan.
The Award is named in honour of Revd. Wallace Clare (1895-1963), a Catholic priest and keen academic who founded the IGRS in 1936 as a response to fire of 1922, which consumed almost the entire contents of Ireland’s Public Record Office.
Fr. Clare was the author of the first-ever work on Irish ancestral research, A Simple Guide to Irish Genealogy, published in 1937, and he was the first individual to be elected a Fellow of the IGRS.
Since its foundation, the Society has gathered together an invaluable collection of transcripts and abstracts compiled from documents subsequently destroyed in the fire. It is the world’s oldest membership organisation devoted to the study and pursuit of Irish genealogy.