Survival in Wicklow: Fascinating records of workhouses
REPORTER DAVIDMEDCALF CRANKED UP HIS TRUSTY COMPUTER AND TOOK A SKIM THROUGH MATERIAL POSTED ONLINE BY WICKLOW COUNTY COUNCIL
WICKLOW County Council has a policy of posting interesting historical material on the internet. Latest to be given this treatment are the workhouse ledgers from Rathdrum (1842-1914) and Shillelagh (1842-1918).
‘They are beautiful records and we are lucky to have them,’ says Wicklow county archivist Catherine Wright. ‘They are records that people are interested in, records of how generations managed to survive.’
She has had the privilege of seeing, and handling the hefty original ledgers which are now available in digitised form on-line at www.wicklow.ie/Living/Services/Arts-Heritage-Archives/ Archives/Collections/Digitised-Collections/ Wicklow-Workhouse-Records. Some of the these documents are in a ‘delicate’ state, as she puts it, while others are fine. The condition of the paperwork is now, to a great extent, irrelevant as the material contained has now been preserved by painstaking camera work.
The result is a resource available to historians and genealogists which is in many ways more flexible than the ledgers themselves. Most valuable is the way that the records are open to close inspection on the computer screen, without any need for a magnifying glass: ‘The quality is so good, and you can zoom in,’ Catherine points out enthusiastically.
The archivist feels it is a matter of good fortune that such a wealth of material is available for the two workhouses. Rathdrum was the more substantial operation but Shillelagh also played its part in combating Victorian and Edwardian poverty in the somewhat pitiless style of the times.
Unfortunately, the records for Baltinglass were destroyed by fire during the 1920s. Other parts of the Wicklow were served by centres outside the county boundary – Loughlinstown in Dublin and Naas in Kildare. The on-line offering is not the same a modern day web-site.
Though the layout resembles computer style Excel sheets in many ways, with columns of names and rows of data, these are photographs not text documents. So it is not possible to search for a name and have it pop up pronto on screen. Nevertheless, Catherine Wright is full of admiration for the manner in which the bureaucrats of the past had ways of keeping tabs on each individual.
‘These people were such good record keepers – they were remarkable,’ she comments referring to the indexes where surnames appear in alpha- betical order, cross referenced to entries in the main register. ‘We are so lucky.’ Let’s log on to www.wicklow.ie and see if there are any Medcalfs (or Metcalfs or Metcalfes) in the annals for the 1840s, for instance.
The first thing to notice is the complete disregard for any 21st century political correctness. The unfortunates who turn up at the workhouse door are not dignified as clients or service users. They are referred to as Paupers, with the capital letter.
THE format of the registers was clearly laid down by a central authority enforcing the sinister body of law called ‘The Irish Poor Relief Acts’. The relevant forms were printed in Dublin by Alexander Thom (the firm best known for their street directories) and headed ‘Persons Admitted into and Discharged from the Workhouse of the Rathdrum Union’. The word Rathdrum is handwritten in, in an impeccable copperplate hand on the standard issue form.
The Poor Law commissioners required each Pauper to be classified by sex, age, trade and religious denomination. The final column on the form allows space to the record keeper to enter the date of the Pauper’s death or discharge from the Workhouse. There is no suggestion that the system had any interest whether the Pauper was alive or dead at this point of departure.
The M’s are logged in the index on pages 10 and 11 of the 83 page register. The only obvious surnames beginning with the letters ME are Meaghan, Meagher and Merrigan with a stray Merna thrown in for good measure – not a Medcalf in sight. The Merna entry is none too clear but appears to be Catherine of that name, her assigned number being 4454.
So, who was Catherine Merna? Scroll down through thousands of Paupers to row 4540 and there she is. But it turns out that Catherine is a mis-read or mistake and she was actually called Esther. She was (no surprise) female, aged 30 on admission, and single.
Her ‘Employment or Calling’ was given as servant and her religious denomination went into the book as RC – Roman Catholic. All of the 40 entries on this page were Roman Catholics and Esther was one of four among the 40 who were listed as servants. Others were taking enforced career breaks from being Nurses (1), Charwomen (6) or Labourers (10).
Most unsettling to modern ways of thinking is the fact that 16 of the 40 had ‘none’ inserted under the employment or calling heading. This lack of
a trade was understandable enough in the case of young Catherine Keough since she was just nine years of age when her details were supplied.
Catherine’s mother Mary – a charwoman – was logged into the system when she arrived from Arklow in April of 1852 as suffering from a fever at that time. The child did not follow until June and the pair were both clocked out in July – whether alive or dead we cannot know but the mention of a fever cannot have boded well for mother and daughter
But back to the brief portrait of servant woman Esther Merna. It turnes out that she came from Trooperstown. She was single and healthy but wearing ‘ bad clothes’ on arrival. The bad clothes were a characteristic she shared with everyone else whose data appear on page 57.
Back to the index. If there were no Medcalfs in the workhouse at Rathdrum in the period 1842 to 1852, could the family possibly show up in Shillelagh instead? The format here is identical though the script in the index is more cramped and more faded that n in the Rathdrum annals.
Again, no members of the clan. Perhaps, while here, it might be instructive to have a look on a whim to see if there are any Sheerans – one of them has done quite well for himself recently in the field of pop music. Hah! Maybe e Number 819 is a Sheeran, though the scrawl seems to show a James Sherown. In a list where Stokes is rendered Stoaks and Sinnott as Synnot, that sounds near enough for jazz.
However, scrolling down to the entry for Num-Number 819, the meandering writing seemsseems to show nothing like Sheeran or Sherown. It just might be Shandon instead though it really is anyone’s guess. The unfortunate James Sherown/Shandon turns out to be male and a servant with a wife whose name is even more illegible.
HIS age is not given but the reason for his being consigned to the care of the Union is apparent. He arrived severely injured by horse and cart (or some other contraption beginning with a C, the writing is a challenge). He lasted only a month on the premises, from July into August of 1856. One can only fear the worst.
Incidentally, James was one of nine Protestants out of the standard bunch of 40 Paupers detailed on page 54 of this section of archive.
The oldest instalment of the Shillelagh register runsruns from earlyearly in 18421842 toto thethe endend ofof 1861.1861. AsAs everyevery attentive schoolchild knows from history class, the potato collapse or Great Hunger ran from 1845 to 1849. But, strange to relate, this fearful collapse of the main staple food crop is not mirrored on the Shillelagh workhouse roll.
It appears that the agricultural and economic collapse accompanied by mass fatalities and migration which was experienced in the West of Ireland did not happen on the same scale in Wicklow. If the workhouse register is a reliable guide, then poverty and desperation were postponed until into the following decade.
The clerks who kept the records filled in a total of 2,800 entries during those two decades 1842-1861 and the overwhelming majority of the entries were made later on in that period. In 1842 the number of admissions was five, with none at all the following year and a mere three in 1844, with five in 1845 and six in 1846.
While the starving populations of Mayo and Galway were experiencing hellish meltdown in 1847 and 1848, Shillelagh welcomed no more than 26 Paupers to its joyless hospitality. The numbers only began to escalate in 1855 when 263 admissions were registered, the first time that the figure reached three figures – long after the Famine had blown its course The worst year was 1856 when 362 persons threw themselves on the mercy of the guardians.
These roughly worked statistics, pulled on a whim by your reporter from the mass of data, suggest that there is scope for a great deal of scholarship and sampling to be done. The delight of the matter is that the raw material is now to hand via the world wide web for anyone who cares to go digging It offers a sobering window into the past.