Wexford County Archives has released the first instalment of its project to digitise its Grand Jury Presentments collection.
Now available here, free to download in (large) pdf format, are the following:
- Presentments from the Summer Assizes of 1817 to the Spring Assizes of 1823
- Famine era Presentments spanning 1847-1850
- Presentments for 1859.
There are many more years of Grand Jury records in the Wexford collection, and these will be digitised as the Archives' digitisation project continues.
Digitising Grand Jury Presentments seems to have been flavour of the Lockdown months in Ireland; several county archives are currently engaged in such projects to make these resources more accessible.
If you're not familiar with the work carried out by the Grand Juries and the types of records they produced, this may be the prompt for investing some time to understand this old local administrative system and finding out how useful the Presentments may or may not be to your Irish family history research. To help in that endeavour, I'd recommend these two resources:
A recording of the People, Place and Power - the Grand Jury System in Ireland conference held a couple of weeks ago. View it here.
A preliminary listing of Grand Jury collections held around the country can be viewed here.
An informative booklet, launched at the above conference, from the Beyond 2022 team. It can be viewed on screen as a flip book or downloaded as a pdf. Click the image below.
