To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Leinster – torpedoed and sunk just one month before the end of the First World War – the RCB Library will feature as its October Archive of the Month the online exhibition entitled “The Leinster Tragedy: Human Interest Stories brought to life by the Church of Ireland Gazette and Other Sources”.
Over the summer, a lot of work has been done to compile a comprehensive and user–friendly writing and reference guide for the students of the Theological Institute.
A €100,000 capital grant towards the digitisation of Church of Ireland parish registers was announced as part of a visit by the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Ms Josepha Madigan TD, to the RCB Library on Monday (10th September).
Among the treasured collections of the RCB Library are several bound series of 19th century pamphlets, many categorised under broad subject headings including education, finance, legal, synodical, the Irish Church Act, and revision (of liturgical matters) as well as a number of miscellaneous topics.
The Representative Church Body Library currently holds 1,114 collections of parish records covering a variety of time spans (some dating back to medieval times, but most from the late 17th Century onwards) and containing a wide variety of sources relating to a multitude of human–interest stories.
Following on from last month’s latest presentation, featuring the particular story of the Ettagh lightning strike, the RCB Library’s service provider Informa has been working on further editions.
In addition to approximately 70,000 books, the RCB Library is the repository for the records of some 1,110 parishes. These registers often contain baptism, marriage, and burial records, but also numerous other items, such as vestry books, account minutes, and confirmation records, as well as other miscellaneous items.
Another decade’s worth of editions of the weekly newspaper, the Church of Ireland Gazette, from 1924 to 1933, has just been digitized and uploaded online by the RCB Library, where they may be consulted as a freely–searchable resource.
The value of the Church of Ireland vestry minute book as a resource for social, economic, religious, and indeed legal history at local parish level is again captured in the latest online presentation in the RCB Library’s Archive of the Month slot.
From the Tin Church in Laragh, County Monaghan, to the Beara peninsula in County Cork – specifically the mining community around Allihies – this month’s ‘News Behind the News’ in the Archive of the Month slot examines the hidden story behind the dismissal of the curate in the parish of Berehaven 150 years ago.
