Liam Mac Alasdair, working within the Genealogical Society of Ireland (GSI), is a man who helped to bring Irish genealogy into the modern world. It is fitting that the GSI should honour his long life of hard work by compiling this celebratory publication. As a former President of the Society, I am delighted to have been asked to contribute an article. In compliance with this request, I will briefly review some of the main developments in Irish genealogy over the eight decades of Liam’s life (to date!). The 1920s witnessed the establishment of an independent Ireland and the destruction of most of our national records. The blame for the explosion and fire in the Four Courts must be shouldered equally by the Pro- and Anti-Treaty forces. The Irregular forces who occupied the Four Courts in mid-April 1922, turned the huge Record Treasury in which most of our national records were stored, into a bomb factory. In June 1922, the Free State forces decided to dislodge the occupiers. They borrowed field guns from the British and bombarded the complex of building, setting it ablaze. Two huge bombs that had been manufactured and stored in the Record Treasury exploded. A contemporary report stated that: ‘Debris was showered far around and charred documents of national records were picked up in the streets a mile away.’ Indeed the violence of the explosion was such that documents were later found on the Hill of Howth, a distance of seven miles. This loss of heritage is sorely felt by every Irish family history researcher. The 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 censuses were stored in the Public Record Office in 1922. The Irish census of 1821 was the first modern census to record personal details: up to 1841, the British counterpart recorded only statistical information. Those records contained the names of every man woman and child who lived in Ireland during those four decades. Had they survived, the census returns alone would get us off to a flying start. Those of 1821 would bring our ancestry back to the eighteenth century with ease. Commenting on the destruction, Winston Churchill said: ‘better a state without documents than documents without a state.’ I wonder? On a positive note, the 1920s saw the establishment of the Irish Manuscripts Commission in 1928. Its foundation was the Free State Government’s attempt to mitigate the impact of the destruction at the Four Courts in which it had played a significant part. The Commission sought out manuscript collections in private hands, records such as estate papers, cataloguing and publishing some of them. Since 1930 it has overseen the publication of over 140 titles. It also published the journal Analecta Hibernica, which provided information on the Commission's work and in which editions of shorter manuscripts were reproduced
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