‘INCREDIBLE’ DONERAILE ARCHIVE
An old box or suitcase, found in the attic covered in dust and cobwebs that has lain untouched for many, many years is found. Inside, a treasure trove of history awaits, be it photos, diaries or minutes from meetings of former societies in times past.
Whether you’ve experienced such a scenario yourself or seen it happen in a film, the scene is a common one. But what happens next? In real life, the County Archivist might be a good call.
Cork City and County Archives were set up in the 1971-1972 period and are responsible for collecting and preserving local archival collections and records of value from throughout the city and county.
“It does happen,” Senior Archivist with Cork City and County Archives service, Brian McGee said.
“We’ve had to go into basements and attics over the years where people have found boxes and boxes of material. We rescued a lot of the town council records from Fermoy. We had to go in and rescue them from where they were.
"We do get calls from people who’ve found boxes of stuff. It's happened a number of times a year. The support of the community is very important to us,” he said.
INTERESTING MATERIAL
Locally, many have donated their archives to the collection to ensure that they survive long into the future and one such person is contributor to The Avondhu, John O’Connell.
John, who runs the ‘Fermoy’ interest page on Facebook, documents a host of Fermoyrelated things, from historic pictures to snippets of present-day life in the town and over the years. Through the years, he has come across several historically significant photographs and printed ephemera.
Speaking with The Avondhu, Mr McGee explained what they look out for as archivists.
“The types of things you would find in personal collections are like letters, personal correspondence, you might occasionally get things like scrapbooks which somebody might have placed photographs into. Photographs are a pretty big set of materials that we would get in. There are printed ephemera, collections of things like one-off concert programmes, match programmes, booklets, leaflets and posters. That was a regular feature of John O’Connell’s Fermoy related archives, printed ephemera.
“It’s the type of thing that strictly speaking are documents as such, but are also oneoff items. They document the history of a particular area and they are important. For future researchers, just think how interesting that kind of material will be in 100 years or even 50 years, to go back and have a look and see what was happening in each area. They’re the type of thing that gets thrown in the bin very easily,” he said.
According to Mr McGee, for an item or collection to be accepted to the County Archive, it needs to be fairly unique or irreplaceable.
“That’s the difference between an archive and a library. An awful lot of library collections are printed journals, magazines, books, that type of thing. We generally don’t take that sort of thing in. With an archive, it’s mainly documents and records and unique items like photographs and one-off leaflets, booklets and programmes. We would assess it on that basis. It kind of documents some aspect of the social or economic history of the city or county,” he said.
One local donation made to the County Archive is that of the photographic collection of Arthur H Jones, an amateur photographer and pharmacist who lived in Doneraile. It was donated by a local woman who had come into possession of the collection containing several hundred glass plate photographs of Doneraile and the North Cork area.
According to Mr McGee, for Arthur H Jones, mixing photography and pharmacology was a likely connection as at the time, photography was rare and rather similar to chemistry.
“Photography, back in the old days, was basically chemistry, so he had expertise in that regard and he seemed to have quite a good camera and he seemed to have the resources. He kept an incredible photo archive of the Doneraile area, absolutely amazing.
“There's nothing dated in them, but it seems to be sort of early 1900s right up to the ‘30s or ‘40s. It’s like a record of village life all through that period. There are lovely photos of people working, the big house, the estate, all of that. That was many, many years before photography was used that much.
“It’s an incredible photo archive,” Mr McGee enthused. “We’re still in the process of making it available on our website, but we’re going to have stuff up within the next year or so on it,” he said.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
yCork City and County Archives take in hundreds of collections each year, each varying from 1 to over 20,000 individual items or documents and with a team ranging from three to five people, the service has their work cut out.
“We’ve taken in hundreds of collections and we have only a limited amount of staff to work on it and it can take a long time to make it accessible and scan it. We spend an awful lot of our time processing collections.
“The first thing is to try and preserve things as far as possible. Then to make them accessible to the public, you have to preserve the physical and intellectual order of the archive. Everything has to be numbered, and stored properly in acid-free boxes in the best possible condition in air-conditioned strongrooms. Archive material like paper and photographs and things like that is quite sensitive and easily damaged, by mould, damp or anything like that. It’s vital that important stuff like that is donated so that it can be preserved properly.
“The staff varies between 3 to 5 over the years. It’s a very small staff really for what we’re trying to do. It’s a major challenge to try and do everything we need to do with the collections.
“We have a rule that only collections that are fully processed and listed are available for research. We have about 1,300 collections here. A collection could be 5,000 items or more. It could be 20,000 or it could be just one item. Each collection is a unique thing. It’s a vast archive of material,” McGee added.
A PUBLIC ASSET
As well as personal collections, the Archives also host corporate and official archives and historical records, which is estimated to make up approximately two-thirds of the collections.
Included are records from the Grand Jury which is the precursor to Cork County Council, town councils, the rural industry council, the vocational and educational committee, government agencies that have operated in Cork over the past number of centuries, etc.
Privately donated archival material includes business archives, solicitors collections like old deeds and legal documents, landed estates and papers.
WAIT… DON’T THROW IT AWAY!|
Records from organisations such as clubs, societies and trade unions are also housed within the Archives, as are school records from some thirty or forty different schools, mainly national schools, across the city and county.
“The whole point of it is that there is a public asset to this stuff eventually. Maybe not immediately, but eventually it will be available for research. That’s the whole point of it at the end of the day.
“If you find a document or photograph or whatever it is, we advise before you do anything with it to give us a ring or send us an email and we would be delighted to have a look at it. We don’t take in books, like printed books, magazines or journals, but we do take in documents, photographs in any format, drawings, and anything like that.
“The thing to do is definitely don’t throw it out if you think it’s of any value, particularly for corporate organisations. A lot of organisations would have had things like minute books, membership registers and photographs. It would be an awful pity if stuff was lost and it's important that people realise that there is a place to put that stuff, the older records that are of no use anymore for present-day organisations. It would have historic value in documenting the history of a particular location or organisation or people in a particular locality.
“Definitely stop, don’t throw it away, hang on to it and let us have a look at it and we’ll go from there!” Mr McGee concluded.
Time to check the attic…