The Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) has been recreated using archival research and ground-breaking digital technology 100 years after its destruction.
Ireland notoriously has much poorer family history records coverage than the UK because the PROI, along with its collection of 800 years of Irish records, was destroyed in a fire on 30 June 1922, near the start of the Irish Civil War.
In February 2018 Beyond 2022, a project to reconstruct the PROI virtually in time for the 100th anniversary of the fire, was announced.
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) was launched on 27 June 2022 at an event in St Patrick’s Hall in Dublin Castle, with speakers including Micheál Martin, the Taoiseach of Ireland.
The Taoiseach said: “It is an invaluable historical resource for people of all heritages across Ireland and for people of Irish heritage around the world. The Virtual Treasury belongs to the people of Ireland, democratising access to our shared heritage.”
The key partner institutions in Beyond 2022 were the National Archives of Ireland, The National Archives in the UK, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. The digital reconstruction was created by the SFI Adapt Centre.
The VRTI holds digitised Irish history documents from over 70 archives around the world and also allows website users to tour a 3D virtual reconstruction of the original PROI building.
They are now free to search online by the names of people and places, keywords and reference numbers.
The VRTI website describes ‘Gold Seams’ of records including the 1766 religious census of Ireland, which can now be searched by name; the Cromwellian Surveys, which mapped and surveyed Ireland in the 17th century as land was taken from the Catholic landowning elite by the British government; and the Medieval Exchequer financial records of Ireland between the 13th and 15th centuries.
Rosemary Collins is the features editor of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine