Newspaper records in Ireland are sources which have been produced in one form or another since the second half of the sixteenth century when the first newsletters and pamphlets were published in Dublin, the capital of Ireland. The first recognizably modern newspaper to be published in Ireland was The Irish Monthly Mercury, publication of which began in the city of Cork in 1649. Newspapers really began to abound in the eighteenth century as The Dublin Evening Post, The Freemans’s Journal, The Dublin Gazette and Faulkner’s Dublin Journal became staples of Irish society. There were more than 160 newspapers in Ireland by the late eighteenth century, many of them local periodicals. That number only continued to expand in the nineteenth century. These newspapers can be very useful for genealogical studies in Ireland, providing different kinds of information, from when people passed away through death notices to the jobs that people worked in through advertisements of local services.[1]
History of newspapers in Ireland
Newspapers in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, evolved gradually following the printing revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This evolution was particularly slow in Ireland, where the first domestically printed works were not produced until the 1550s and 1560s when a number of religious publications appeared.[2] Thereafter an indigenous print industry began to emerge, though it was the seventeenth century before it was of any considerable size. Furthermore, in these times there really weren’t any newspapers in the modern sense being published in Europe. Instead cheap and one-off quarto pamphlets and newsletters were published on specific news events. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that newspapers, in the sense of a publication that gathered news stories together and published articles about them monthly, weekly or even daily, began to appear.[3]
Where the English print industry went in early modern times, Ireland soon followed. Once newspapers became fashionable and boomed in popularity in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, individuals in Dublin began setting up their own newspapers. Soon they had spread to the other towns in the country. The nature of these varied. Some, such as The Dublin Evening Post, were papers that aspired to capture a national audience, or at least a large proportion of the Dublin market, and were published several times a week.[4] These were often broadsheets, a format which became common from the 1712 onwards after the British government began taxing newspapers based on how many pages long they were. Bigger pages meant lower taxes. Others were much more limited in their ambitions. For instance, publications like the Clonmell Journal and The Waterford Herald were aiming at their own local readerships in the towns of Clonmel and Waterford.[5]
In the nineteenth century there were often over a hundred newspapers in business in Ireland at a given time, though business was difficult and some were only in operation for a few years before ceasing publication. Others were limited operations, often being a four or eight-page broadsheet that was published just once a week. The commercial opportunities for newspapermen grew from mid-century as the concept of placing advertisements for a person’s business gained traction. A casual perusal of Irish newspapers will reveal that they were largely devoid of advertisements in 1800, but by 1900 every page had many spaces advertising the services of coal merchants, seamstresses, shoe-makers, tailors, hat-sellers, undertaker-services and grocery stores.[6] It was also in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some of Ireland’s most well-known newspapers in modern times, such as The Irish Times,[7] The Irish Independent[8] and The Cork Examiner[9] (rebranded as The Irish Examiner in 2000), first appeared.
Where to find Irish newspaper records
Irish newspaper records are found in a wide range of different locations. Copies of most newspapers published in the twentieth century are generally kept in the archives of the larger local libraries around Ireland. For the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one will typically have to visit one of Ireland or Britain’s larger research libraries such as the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland or the British Library in order to consult them in the original. That said, the last ten to twenty years have seen a major move to digitize newspaper records all over the world and to make them searchable using Optical Character Recognition and most Irish newspapers dating back to the eighteenth century can now be accessed online.[10] Some Irish newspapers such as The Belfast Gazette are available through MyHeritage's OldNews.com.
What can be found in Irish newspaper records
The range of genealogical information which can be found in Irish newspaper records varies depending on the time period being examined. For the eighteenth century it is generally the case that you will only be able to learn something about an ancestor if they happened to actually be featured in a news story of some kind. That shifted notably from around 1820 onwards when the concept of having an obituaries section in newspapers recording the deaths of local people emerged. This means Irish newspapers can be used to search for death notices for much of the nineteenth century.[11]
A further shift began from around the 1850s onwards as the number of advertisements being placed in newspapers expanded. By the end of the nineteenth century the front pages of most broadsheets might have a dozen or more advertisements for various kinds of businesses. This can make newspaper records very useful in identifying what the profession of an ancestor might have been or if they owned a business and where it was located in a particular town.[12] These are just some of the more common elements of family history which might show up in newspaper records from Ireland, yet many other points of detail about an ancestor, whether it be an appearance in a court, the publishing of a book or a fire in their house, could be recorded in a news story.
See also
Explore more about newspaper records in Ireland
- United Kingdom Newspapers from OldNews.com records collection on MyHeritage
- Newspapers: Critical Resource to Complete Your Family Tree at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Newspapers for Genealogists: Using GenealogyBank.com to document every day of your ancestors' lives at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Using Irish Newspapers and Other Printed Material at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- These Genealogists Already Struck Gold on OldNews.com at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 2005).
- ↑ E. R. McClintock Dix, ‘Humfrey Powell, the First Dublin Printer’, in The Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 27C (1908/1909), pp. 213–216.
- ↑ https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/PAMP1.htm
- ↑ R. B. McDowell, ‘Irish Newspapers in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 8, No. 2, Media and Popular Culture (1984), pp. 40–43.
- ↑ https://www.gale.com/intl/c/british-library-newspapers-part-vi
- ↑ https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/amy-j-lloyd-advertising
- ↑ https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/irish-times
- ↑ https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/irish-independent
- ↑ https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/cork-examiner
- ↑ https://www.irishnewsarchive.com/
- ↑ https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2023/02/07/your-guide-to-obituaries-on-the-archive/
- ↑ https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/amy-j-lloyd-advertising