Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records by Chris Paton

Author:Chris Paton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REFERENCE / Genealogy & Heraldry
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fortunately for the tenants, nobody would buy the impounded animals, which were soon restored to them upon payment of their rents, with assistance from relief payments raised by the new Catholic Association. The full story is detailed in Martin Cahill’s article ‘The 1826 General Election in County Monaghan’, within the Clogher Record, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1964), pp. 161–183, accessible via JSTOR (www.jstor.org).

As noted earlier, following Catholic emancipation in 1829, the property qualification for voters was increased to at least £10 for freeholders, disenfranchising many who previously held land at 40 shillings of value (i.e. £2). Thanks to the Representation of the People Act in 1832, the voting qualification was extended to £10 for freeholders, but also to holders of leases for lives (p.107), and to those who held leaseholds for sixty years.

An interesting consequence of the 1832 Act was the creation of a parliamentary Fictitious Votes Committee, concerned with fraudulent voter registration. The published Reports from Committees, Fictitious Votes (Ireland), Select Committee on Fictitious Votes, 1837–1838 contains names from some 52,600 people so registered between 1832 and 1837 (most notably for Dublin). The collection is found on Findmypast, where it is entitled ‘Ireland, Select Committee On Fictitious Votes 1837–1838’, with an explanatory guide to the areas it contains records for detailed by the company’s Irish team at https://web.archive.org/web/20210120110054/https://www.findmypast.ie/articles/world-records/full-list-of-the-irish-family-history-records/census-land-and-substitutes/reports-from-committees-fictitious-votes-ireland-select-committee-on-fictitious-votes-1837-1838.

The original published editions from the Select Committee on Fictitious Votes Ireland can also be found freely on the Internet Archive, and include much of the evidence presented by those interviewed. Further information on the Fictitious Votes Committee can be found within the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, which will also list freeholders from various areas in various reports and discussions from 1801 to 1922. The information can be found on the ProQuest hosted House of Commons Parliamentary Papers website (accessible via subscribing institutions), or the DIPPAM website at www.dippam.ac.uk, which includes the freeto-access ‘Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland’ (EPPI) collection.

Findmypast also has a database entitled ‘Ireland, Electoral Registers 1885–1886’, which contains electoral registers from some twelve counties: Armagh, Fermanagh, Down, Limerick, Mayo, Meath, Tyrone, Roscommon, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow.

For Ulster, a selection of poll books from 1710 to 1840, showing who was eligible to vote or how they voted, has been made available on the PRONI website. PRONI also hosts the 1918 Absent Voters Lists from Counties Armagh and Londonderry, naming people engaged in war service who were eligible to vote, including members of the armed forces, the Merchant Navy, and those serving with the Red Cross and similar organisations.

For more recent electoral registers, listing those entitled to vote, there are collections held at the National Archives of Ireland, the NLI, and PRONI, but they are incomplete. Consult the catalogues for their respective holdings.

Dublin City registers from 1908 to 1915 are searchable online at https://databases.dublincity.ie, whilst further rolls from 1937 to 1964 can be searched via databases in the Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street. A complete set of Northern Irish registers from 1947 onwards is held also at the British Library in London, as well as registers for some earlier years.

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