Chapter 1
It is local history that matters –It is local history that binds people together and gives them a sense of place.
In Ireland the administrative divisions are counties, baronies, civil parishes and townlands.(1) The largest of these divisions is a province and the smallest is a townland. Ireland is divided into four provinces: Connacht, Ulster, Munster and Leinster. Each province is composed of a number of counties. Ireland is divided into four provinces: Connacht, Muster Ulster and Leinster. Each province is composed of a number of counties.
The barony is an important sub-division of a county. The usual number per county is seven to ten. There are 17 baronies in County Galway, including the baronies of Tiaquin,Ballymoe, Kiltartan, Moycullen, Dunkellin etc. Sometimes if a barony covers part of two counties, it is known then as a half barony (in each county). This land division is thought to be Norman or pre-Norman. From the 16th to 19th centuries it was officially used in land transactions, census, surveys etc. There are over 300 hundred baronies in Ireland but they were abolished as administrative areas in the late 19 century.
There are two types of parishes in Ireland; civil and ecclesiastical. There are over 2,500 parishes in Ireland. Civil parish boundaries often cross barony and county boundaries. This administrative division is thought to have originated in the 13th century. Civil parishes were created for the compilation of valuations and census returns. Civil parishes are generally comprised of 25 to 30 townlands as well as towns and villages.
The ecclesiastical parish area is the basic area over which a Parish Priest or minister serves. Church of Ireland parishes generally conform to civil parish boundaries, Roman Catholic parishes are generally larger.
A townland is the smallest land division used in Ireland. They can vary in size immensely; some can be less than 10 acres while others can comprise several thousand acres. On average they comprise 350 acres. Despite the name most townlands do not contain towns, indeed some have no inhabitants at all. There are approximately 66,462 townlands in Ireland. One difficulty with townlands is that many have the same name.
A diocese is another administrative division in Ireland. Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland parishes are organised into diocese. The diocesan boundaries do not conform to county boundaries. In County Galway, the dioceses including the Church of Ireland United dioceses of Tuam, Killala and Achonary. The Roman Catholic diocese covers part of Counties Galway and Clare, and the Tuam archdiocese covers parts of Counties Galway and Mayo.
The poor law act of 1838 introduced a new administrative division to Ireland- The Poor Law Union (P.L.U.). The country was divided into approximately 160 P.L.U.,s. Each Unon was made up of a number of townlands with a marked town at the centre. A workhouse was built in the town for the relief of the poor within the Union. Rates and land based taxes were paid by the property holders within the union for the upkeep of the poor. Some of the P.L.U.,s in County Galway included the Union of Glanamaddy, the Union of Tuam ets. The Unions was later used as General Registrars’ Districts.
Irish dioceses set up in 12 th century led to local parishes in the 13th century. Up to then local monasteries provided the real needs of locality (they had their origins in Reverend founder eg, parishes Cuanna Fursey and Brendan) and the newly formed parishes often took their names from old monastic settlements . Following Reformation and Tudor conquests in the 16 century. parishes were given a new role when they became areas of civil adminstratopm (as well as parishes of established Church. These parishes were based on Roman Catholic Pre- Reformation ones and when following the easing of Penal Laws in second half of (18,C, RC Parish began to organise openly again, RC and Civil Parishes are largely "coterminous "(allowing for subsequent amalgamation) These took place in later (18 and early(19: modern RC Parishes composed of 3or 4 older ones. The dividing line between half parishes difficult to determine. There was not always amalgamation and for these there is an almost identical match between R.C. and Civil Parishes.
CIVIL RECORDS
State registration of non-Catholic marriages began in Ireland in 1845. All births deaths and marriages have been registered in Ireland since 1864. It was, in fact, an offshoot of the Victorian public health system, in turn based on the Poor Law, an attempt to provide some measure of relief for the most destitute. Between 1838 and 1852, 163 workhouses were built throughout the country, each at the centre of an area known as a Poor Law Union. The workhouses were normally situated in a large market town, and the Poor Law Union comprised the town and its catchment area with the result that the Unions in many cases ignored the existing boundaries of parishes and counties. In the 1850’s a large-scale public health system was created, based on the areas covered by the Poor Law Unions each Union was divided into Dispensary Districts, with an average of six to seven Districts per Union, and a Medical Officer normally a doctor was given responsibility for public health in each District. When the registration of all births deaths and marriages then began in 1864, these Dispensary Districts also became Registrars Districts, with a Registrar responsible for collecting the registrations within each District. In most cases the Medical Officer for the Dispensary District now also acted as the Registrar for the same area, but not in every case. The superior of this local Registrar was the superintendent Registrar responsible for all the Registers within the old Poor Law Union. The return for the entire Poor Law Union were indexed and collated centrally, and master indexes for the entire country were produced at the General Register Office in Dublin.
After the coming of the Reformation to Ireland in the sixteenth century parish the structures of the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland diverged. In general the Church of Ireland retained the older medieval parochial divisions and these were always used for administrative purposes by the secular authorities. Thus civil parishes the basic geographical units in early censuses, tax records and land surveys, are almost identical to Church of Ireland parishes. The Catholic Church on the other hand, weakened by the confiscation of its assets and the restrictions on its clergy, had to create larger and less convenient parishes. In some ways however, this weakness produced more flexibility, allowing parishes to be centred on new growing population centres and in the nineteenth century permitting the creation of new parishes to accommodate this growth in population. The differences in the parish structures of the two Churches are reflected in their records. Even allowing for the fact that members of the Church of Ireland were almost always a small minority of the total population, the record of each are proportionally less extensive than Catholic records, covering a smaller area, and are thus relatively easy to search in detail. Catholic records, by contrast, cover the majority of the population and a much larger geographical area, and as a result can be very time consuming to search in detail. The creation of new Catholic parishes in the nineteenth century can also mean that the registers relevant to a particular area may be split between two parishes. Both Catholic and Church of Ireland parishes are organised on the diocesan basis first laid out in the Synot of Kells in the Middle Ages, and remain almost identical, although the Catholic system has amalgamated some of the small medieval dioceses
Lewis’ ‘Topographical Dictionary of Ireland’ (1837) gives an account, in alphabetical order, of all the civil parishes of Ireland, and specifics the corresponding Catholic parish.
Because of the destruction of nineteenth-century census returns, surviving lands and property records from the period have acquired a somewhat unnatural importance. Two surveys cover the entire country, the Title Applotment Books of c 1823-38, and Griffith’s Valuation dating from 1848 to 1864. The smallest division, the townland, is the one which has proved most enduring. loosely related to the ancient Gaelic ‘Bally betagh’, and to others medieval lands division such as ploughlands and ‘quarters’ townlands can very enormously in size, from a single acre or less to several thousand acres. There are more than 64,000 townlands in the country.They were used as the smallest geographical unit in both Tithe Survey and Griffith’s, as well as census return. These are a legacy of the middle ages, pre-dating the formation of counties and generally coextensive with the parishes of the Established Church, the Church of Ireland They are not to be confused with Catholic parishes which are usually much larger. In turn, civil parishes are collected together in baronies. Originally related to the tribal divisions, the tuatha,of Celtic Ireland, these were multiplied and subdivided over the centuries up to their standardisation in the 1500,so that the current names represent a mixture of Gaelic, Anglo-Norman and English influences.
The Books of Survey and Distribution during the period 1636-1703 are abstracts of surveys and changes in land ownership in Ireland. They were used to impose the quit rent, a rent which was payable yearly on lands granted under the Act of Settlement of 1662 and the Act of Explanation of 1665. They constitute an official record of landed proprietors and their respective estates.(Appendix 1.)
Two important sources for landholding patterns in townlands are the Tithe Applotment Books and Griffith’s Valuation. The Tithe Applotment Books were drawn up in the 1820’s and 1830’s for the purpose of composition of tithes under the tithe reform act of 1823
The Composition Act of 1823 specified that tithes due to the Established Church, the Church of Ireland, which had hitherto been payable in kind, should now be paid in money. As a result, it was necessary to carry out a valuation of the entire country,civil parish by civil parish, to determine how much would be payable by each landholder. This was done over the ensuing fifteen years up to the abolition of tithes in 1838. Not surprisingly, tithes were fiercely resented by those who were not members of the Church of Ireland, and all the more because the tax was not payable on all lands; the exemptions produced spectacular inequalities.
In order to produce the accurate information necessary for local taxation the Tenement Act, 1842 provided for a uniform valuation of all property in Ireland to be based on the productive capacity of land and the potential rent of buildings. The man appointed Commissioner of Valuation was Richard Griffith, a Dublin geologist, and the result of his great survey,the Primary Valuation of Ireland, were published between 1848 and 1864. The Valuation is arranged by county, barony, poor law union parish
and townland, and lists every landholder and every householder in Ireland.
Clonbern is mostly in the barony of Ballymoe with the southern part in the barony of Tiaquin. 46 Townlands were researched based on the civil parishes, original 33 from Griffith’s valuation and as the church parish of Clonbern has changed over the years, losing some to Dunmore and gaining some from Kilkerrin, these were also included.. Some townlands have two names eg.Derrymore, Derrynakirka, Derryna buie and Ballinabhainne.
In the early 1800’ three things happened in Ireland: Ordnance Survey under Colby, Land Valuation under Richard Griffiths and O’Donovan’s letters who had the task of checking names. The first edition of the O.S.series of six-inch maps of Ireland recorded a snapshot of the country’s land divisions, eg county and parish endured whilst barony and deanery fell into disuse.(2) Townlands, however, because of their size, their association with family and with the home place remain the most intimate and enduring of the Irish land division.The strong attachment of family to townland is best appreciated through the examination of placenames. Many townlands are names after their principal families. The O.S.recorded 62,205 townlands in all. The recorded history and provenance of individual townlands varies enormously, townlands are the earliest allotment on the scale of Irish land division,roughly equivalent to an intermediate grade of Irish and Anglo-Norman measures of land such as ballyboes, quarters, carucates and ploughlands. Townslands were economically viable units, pragmatic mechanisms for dividing land that evolved to suit the people that used them. This mapping of townlands for the first edition of the O.S. maps led to them being used as administrative units in order to make census-taking more accurate from 1841 and to use as the basic framework in Griffith’s Valuation. In addition, Poor Law unions and the later District Electoral Divisions were created from groups of townlands. Townlands continue to be used as administrative units for census-taking and for postal addresses. But the townland is above all a social unit, a division which evolved to suit the people who owned or occupied the land . Boundaries were often recited from memory and the older inhabitants consulted about them when disputes arose.