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.
The next feature in the ‘News Behind the News’ series at the RCB Library, which aims to recover lesser known stories from the pages of the Church of Ireland Gazette (formerly Ecclesiastical Gazette up until 1900 and the Church’s weekly newspaper since 1856) moves to the diocese of Clogher and county of Monaghan, unearthing how Laragh Tin Church came to be constructed at the end of the 19th century
February’s Archive of the Month at the RCB Library showcases the Irish Huguenot Archive, and makes available online for the first time a detailed finding aid to its content.
August 2017’s commemorative feature on the Irish Convention of 1917, with a particular focus on the reaction of the Church of Ireland and members of its community, included reference to Rosamond Stephen (1868–1951), along with her picture, which elicited some followers to wonder who this enigmatic woman was and how she came to be the founder of what would become the RCB Library.
