OS200: Spotlight on the Ordnance Survey Memoirs

This blog is the third and final post in a series that marks 200 years since the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland.

OS200 research project

This year marks 200 years since the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. As home to a significant Ordnance Survey Archive, the Library of the Royal Irish Academy is pleased to be a partner in the OS200 research project. 

The third instalment of this blog series will look at the Ordnance Survey Memoirs written by the surveyors while out in the field.  

The OS Memoirs

The Royal Irish Academy holds the original collection of manuscript OS Memoirs that were compiled in the 1830s by the members of the OS surveying team. They included, the previously mentioned, John O’Donovan, MRIA (1806-1861), appointed to the Ordnance Survey in 1830,  Captain Thomas Larcom, MRIA (1801-1879), and George Petrie, MRIA (1790-1866). The Memoirs comprise descriptions of topographical details and antiquities that could not easily be summarised in cartographic form on the accompanying maps.  

Arranged by county and parish in fifty-two boxes the Memoirs contain information on landscape, topography, population, economy and society, as well as recording features of antiquarian interest. OS Memoirs exist for counties Antrim, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Derry and Tyrone, together with a small amount of material relative to some parishes in counties Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, Louth and Sligo. Government funding for the scheme was withdrawn in 1839-40 before any memoirs were compiled for the remainder of the country.  

Immigration and emigration

The Memoirs capture fascinating details about anything and everything related to the area the surveyor was working. An area of particular interest to family historians, genealogists and social historians would be where the Memoirs record details relating to emigration. The emigration information captured by the surveyors is extremely important as they wrote down the names, ages and religion of the persons emigrating and to the port that they were destined to arrive in. The first image below shows the people that emigrated from the parish of Aghagallon in County Antrim in 1836 and 1837. Looking at the names it becomes obvious that whole families were amongst those emigrating. The second image and surveyor’s notes give a very different picture in relation to emigration in this area. The survey notes that the number of people that emigrate annually is eight and that lack of work ‘…does not oblige the above, or any number of persons, to migrate to harvest, to foreign countries; that they go merely for pleasure & experience sake.’  

Another parish that highlights the emigration of families to places such as New York and Philadelphia in America and Quebec in Canada, is Ballywillin in County Derry. The list below is from a few years earlier than those of Aghagallon, as they refer to the years 1833 and 1834. They also record the townland the person was leaving from, which for historians is a vital piece of information in tracking immigration patterns. In the case of the McShane family who left for Quebec, the townland of Islandmore lost seven members of its community, including five children. There are numerous examples of emigration lists throughout the Memoirs.

A myriad of detail

The Memoirs house such a variety of detail relating to a particular area, they are a riveting read! To illustrate this, the table below lists all the headings taken from the Statistical Memoir of the Parish of Drumlomman in County Cavan. Under each heading there are detailed notes, sometimes two or three pages long.  

In some parishes, the different crimes that were carried out are also noted. However, the names of those found guilty are not recorded. An example of these crimes can be seen in the image below which relates to the town of Carrickfergus in Antrim. These crime figures cover the years 1828 and then 1832 to 1838. It’s interesting to note that the crime with the third highest numbers is ‘Wages, disputes about’.  

Memoir Drawings and Publications

The Memoirs include over 1,600 pen and ink drawings which record details of archaeological and antiquarian features completed by surveyors working in the field. The drawings were catalogued with funding from the Esmé Mitchell Trust and Atlantic Philanthropies and digitized with funding from the OS200 Project. The Memoirs have been published in a set of 40 volumes plus an index volume, under the editorship of Angélique Day and Patrick McWilliams in the 1980s and are available for consultation in the RIA Library. However, the sketches were not published in these volumes, instead a small subset was reproduced in Glimpses of Ireland’s past – the Ordnance Survey Memoir Drawings: Topography and technique by Angelique Day in 2014. The vast majority of the drawings will be reproduced for the first time as part of the OS200 project where they will be digitally reunited with the text of the Memoirs.  

This is the last blog in our OS200 series but, hopefully, it has whet your appetite to delve further into the Ordnance Survey Collections, either by coming in to our Reading Room to consult the material or online at OS200 A Digital Archive of Ireland’s Ordnance Survey.