Tuesday, 25 May 2021, 2:30 – 5pm

People, Place and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History

Presented in association with Local Government Archivists and Records Managers.

Links to videos in podcast -

People, Place and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History - Donegal - YouTube -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5csuCtgQFY8

People, Place and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History - Wicklow Archive - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1roH2WOJBs

People, Place and Power: Grand Jury Records and Local History - YouTube Offaly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDVOFf7SnqY

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Grand Jury was ‘most important local body in rural Ireland’. Its records are a unique source for Irish local history, social change and genealogy. While many Grand Jury records were destroyed during the 1916–1923 period, vital collections still survive at local level across Ireland, where they are preserved by Local Archive services.

The showcase will reveal how the Grand Jury’s decisions impacted directly on daily life, enforcing the law at the local level, collecting taxation and deciding where it would be spent. Grand Juries did more than build roads, bridges, courthouses and prisons. They paid for orphaned children to be boarded-out, escorted convicts for transportation, and produced very early and highly detailed maps of their districts.

Professor Virginia Crossman, author of Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, will discuss the significance of the Grand Jury records for historical research. The showcase will also visit – virtually – the reading rooms of three Local Archive services across the country, in Counties Donegal, Offaly and Wicklow, bringing you into contact with these fascinating records.

Speakers:

Professor Virginia Crossman (Emerita, Oxford Brookes)

Niamh Brennan (Donegal Archives); Lisa Shortall (Offaly Archives); Catherine Wright (Wicklow County Archives & Genealogy Service)

Brian Gurrin and David Brown (Beyond 2022 Project).

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/