10:30 AM - Noon CST (UTC-5)
Presented by Brian Gurrin from Ireland
$15 for IGSI members (with Discount Code); $20 for non-members
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In the opening barrage of the Irish Civil War in 1922, seven centuries of Ireland's public records burned in the Four Courts building in Dublin. Wills, census and court records — the paper trail of a nation — were destroyed in a single tragic day.
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) is reconstructing them. Hosted by Trinity College Dublin, this international partnership draws on 75+ archives worldwide — in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the UK — to retrieve surviving copies and reunite them online. Over 350,000 records are restored so far, and the efforts continue. The goal is a free, open-access, permanent repository.
Dr Brian Gurrin is the VRTI's census and population specialist and a postdoctoral fellow in Trinity's Department of History. He's written extensively on Irish census-taking and co-authored The Irish Religious Censuses of the 1760s (2022). Now he's tackling genealogy's most notorious dead end: the fragmentary 1813–15 census, long dismissed by researchers as unusable. His mission is to prove it isn't.
