Though the landed gentry represented only a small percentage of the Irish people, records are plentiful for them. Pedigrees of many of the landed gentry are deposited in the Genealogical Office in Dublin. The Family History Library (FHL) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has microfilm copies of most of those pedigrees. Both deed and probate records, which are also microfilm resources at the FHL, are replete with entries for the privileged upper class. Few people realize, however, that many of the landed estate owners kept detailed records of their estates, including records of their tenants. These estate records are invaluable for the genealogist.

The diversity of sources found in estate records is amazing. One of the better estate records that I am aware of is that of the Brownlow family of Co. Armagh, ¹ These estate papers, which are deposited in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), consist of 520 volumes and more than 9,000 numbered documents. Included in the records are a pedigree (dating from the 1600s to the 1980s) and a brief history of the family, a list of the townlands encompassed by the estate, account books, correspondence, ejectment records, freeholders registers, household inventories and accounts, Irish Land Commission papers, Manorial Court books (including names of jury members, overseers, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses), lease books and leases, mill records, plans and maps, rentals, school records (names of the pupils, their age, religion, residence, and names of the parents are listed for the Lurgan Free School dating from 1786 to 1795; also included is a list of poor parishioners in Shankill to whom aid was provided from 1810 to 1814), title deeds, valuation and surveys, wage books, yeomanry documents, and miscellaneous records.

Estate records usually include the business accounts of the estate owner or his agents. Such accounts might detail the type of work done and wages paid to tenants for various tasks performed on the estate. A workmen's account book for an estate in counties Donegal and neighboring Londonderry mentions the employees by name, what each did over a period of several months, and sometimes how much they were paid. John McConnaghy, for instance, during the week of 18 December 1865, topped turnips on Monday, washed turnips on Tuesday, loaded hay on Wednesday, topped turnips on Thursday, threshed on Friday, and worked with manure on Saturday.²

Estate records may also contain information about tenants who emigrated, often under assisted emigration schemes sponsored by estate owners. The estate records of the Kingwilliamstown Crown Estate (an estate belonging to the king) include a return of persons who emigrated to America in 1849 and 1850. Names of the emigrants, ages, relationships, and the townland of residence were included in those lists.³

Some estate owners took censuses of their tenants. The rent rolls of the Templetown estate in Co. Londonderry include a list of the tenant families with names, ages, relationships, religion, and observations recorded. Included in those observations was the fact that several of the families emigrated to America (the family of William John Boyd, for instance, went to California). ⁴

Many of the documents found in estate records include deeds or leases. Several years ago, as a fledgling Irish genealogist, I read Rosemary ffolliott's chapter, "The Registry of Deeds for Genealogical Purposes," in Irish Genealogy: A Record Finder (Donal. F. Begley, ed. Dublin: Heraldic Artists, 1981). ffolliott claimed that wealthy landowners rarely registered tenant leases. To prove that claim, she checked some 300 property transactions contained in the Jephson estate (located in Mallow, Co. Cork) records and found only six of the leases in the Registry of Deeds.

Wanting to test that hypothesis myself, I did a similar study in 1994 in microfilmed Ecclesville estate records ⁵ (see "Irish Estate Records: A Source for Unregistered Deeds" Irish Roots, no. 3 (1994)). This estate includes property in and around Fintona, Co. Tyrone. To register deeds, the estate owner or his agent had to travel some 80 miles to the office of the Registry of Deeds in Dublin. Obviously, it was not convenient both in time and distance to register a land transaction. Of the 144 leases dating from 1736 to 1809 that were summarized in the estate records, only 18 were registered. Thus, only 12.5% of the leases for this particular estate were found in the Registry of Deeds.

More recently, I found a summary list of 18th and 19th century Domville estate leases in the 1991 issue of A Window on the Past, the journal of the Rathfeigh History Society (Co. Meath, Ireland). The property detailed in this list is approximately 15 miles from Dublin, and the Domville estate owners lived in Co. Dublin. Surely, I thought, the percentage of deeds in this list that were officially registered would be greater because time and distance were not as much a factor. Much to my surprise, I found that the percentage was almost exactly the same. Of the 39 leases summarized, only five appear in the Registry of Deeds (12.8%). These studies reinforce ffolliott's theory that wealthy estate owners rarely registered tenant leases in the Registry of Deeds, and, I would add, estate records are a particularly rich source of unregistered deeds.

Locating estate records is not always easy. You must first know the name of the estate owner. For 19th century families, Griffith's valuation, a "tax" assessed in the 1850s and 1860s, can be useful in determining the name. Other resources helpful in identifying estate owners have been published. These include:

De Burgh, U.H. Hussey. The Landowners of Ireland: an Alphabetical List of the Owners of Estates of 500 Acres or £500 Valuation and Upwards in Ireland. Dublin: Hodges, Foster, and Figgis, 1878. Landowners in Ireland. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1988. This is the same source as the previous cited reference but it is arranged by counties. Lyons, Mary Cecelia. Illustrated Encumbered Estates Ireland 1850-1905. Whitegate, Co. Clare, Ireland: Ballinakella Press, 1993.

A new series of Ireland county histories is being produced. Cork: History & Society (Patrick O'Flanagan and Cornelius G. Buttimer, eds. Dublin: Geography Publications, 1993), the one for Co. Cork, includes a map of the county with the surnames of the estate owners (determined from Griffith's valuation) identified by graphic symbols. Waterford: History & Society (William Nolan and Thomas P. Power, eds. Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992) has both a table and a map showing the names of the estate owners (also determined from Griffith's valuation) and the core locations of the estates.

Once the name of the estate owner is known, you must try to find out if estate records exist and where they are located. Some have been deposited in Ireland on a local level (county or university libraries, for example). It is sometimes useful to write to the local repositories. Other estate records have been deposited in various national repositories. Richard Hayes, while director of the National Library in Dublin in the 1960s, compiled a catalog of manuscript holdings in private keeping or deposited in various repositories throughout Ireland, England, and other countries. That multi-volume published catalog, Manuscript Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1965), includes details of estate records that he located. The subject index has sections for estate records and for rentals (rent lists). The place index includes lists of estate records at the front of each county. The person index references estate records by the name of the estate owner.

John Grenham, Tracing Your Irish Ancestor: the Complete Guide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillian Ltd., 1992) continues where Hayes left off. Grenham lists estate records for every county in Ireland that are found in the National Library in Dublin and estate records that have been published in periodicals.

In 1994, PRONI published Guide to Landed Estate Records. This two-volume reference covers estate papers for the counties of Northern Ireland (Antrim Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone) that are deposited at PRONI. The FHL has a copy of the Guide; it cannot be accessed at a local family history center (branches of the FHL), however, unless the center has purchased its own copy. You can buy this reference and other resources produced by PRONI by writing to PRONI at 66 Balmoral Ave., Belfast BT9 6NY, Northern Ireland.

Although PRONI also has estate records for counties in the Republic of Ireland, those records are not included in the Guide. I am also at a loss to explain why the listing for the Brownlow estate in the Guide does not include the pedigree and history, school records, freeman lists, and other documents that are listed in the microfilmed PRONI catalog. Perhaps those records were included in other PRONI collections. At any rate, by consulting the microfilmed PRONI catalog (the most recent FHL microfilming was done about 1990) at the FHL or its centers, you can determine what estate records are deposited there that are not listed in the Guide.

Since some estate owners resided in England, Scotland, and Wales, it is not unusual to find Irish estate records in repositories in those countries. Some repositories have published catalogs of their holdings. Chadwyck-Healey in England is producing an ongoing series of microfiche inventories-the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United Kingdom and Ireland ⁶ (NIDS)-of various repositories. Among the repositories included in NIDS are several English county record offices, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales. By consulting NIDS, you may find references to Irish estate records deposited in those inventoried repositories.

Many estate records are still in private hands. A few years ago I visited with the current estate owner of property near Skibbereen, Co. Cork. While he was more than willing to let me look through his records, I didn't have the time (and it would have taken days) to look through the mounds of boxed papers stacked against the walls in his library. Not only were the records unindexed and disorganized, but the cooperative landlord had no idea of what information they contained. The task was hopeless. To find out if estate records are currently in family archives, you must know the name and address of the present estate owner. It may be useful to contact a local postmaster/postmistress, school teacher, or minister/priest in the area where the ancestor lived. If that person doesn't know the name and address of the current estate owner, he or she may be able to supply the name and address of a local historian who could help.

As evidenced by the cumulative published catalogs of PRONI and the Public Record Office of Dublin (now called the National Archives), solicitors or lawyers may also have estate papers of landed gentry families. Details regarding who deposited records include the names and addresses of several solicitors or their heirs whose private papers were donated to national repositories. The Brownlow estate records, for example, were deposited by a solicitor's firm in Lurgan, Co. Armagh. Present-day firms may not be willing to grant researchers access to their records. When I tried to find out if a solicitor's office in the city of Carlow had 19th century records for an estate in that county, I was told that any such documents were confidential. Since the employee I spoke to had no idea what records were in storage (the office had no catalog of its older holdings), I was not able to ascertain if they even had the records I needed.

The FHL has a limited collection of Irish estate records. Some are part of large collections of miscellaneous records microfilmed in various archives. Others are published books, such as no. 20 and no. 25 of Analecta Hibernica, which consist of extensive surveys of estate paper in private keeping (some of those records have since been donated to Irish repositories). Many of the Irish genealogical or historical periodicals include extracts of estate records, such as names of people in rent lists or in assisted emigration lists.

Until all of the estate records in the FHL collection have been identified and cataloged separately, it is necessary to check the FHL Catalog (FHLC) under several subject headings: Ireland-Archives and libraries; Ireland-Archives and Libraries-Inventories, Registers, Catalogs; Ireland-Land and Property; Ireland, (county)-Land and Property. References to estate records in Irish periodicals and other sources at the FHL can also be found in Smith's Genealogical Source Index: Ireland. This multi-volume index is expected to be available soon on microfiche through the family history centers.

It is not always easy to trace Irish tenant families. The record destruction that took place in Ireland effectively wiped out most of the census returns, many of the probate records (although tenants seldom left wills), and a good portion of the Church of Ireland records. For Catholic families, records may not begin early enough to locate an ancestor. Deeds, the bulk of which are lease, may contain information for the poorer segment of the Irish population. As has been shown, a large percentage of the deeds were not recorded in the Registry of Deeds. Thus, estate records remain as one of the few sources that provide details about the day-to-day lives of the tenant class as well as genealogical information that might not be found in any other source.