I have had a lifelong fascination with reference books. From an early age these compendiums of facts
and figures fascinated me. Haydn’s Dictionary
of dates was one such book and although last published in the late 19th
Century it was commonly available in many public and school libraries in the
1950’s. The dictionary had particularly
grandiose titles. The 1881 edition
enjoyed the title “Haydn’s dictionary of dates and useful information relating
to all ages and nations containing the history of the world to the Autumn of
1881”. Not many publications would make
such claims today!
As a young historian first dabbling in history of his hometown,
books such as Michael Kavanagh’s Bibliography of County Kildare were an invaluable
resource as I worked my way through the records in the National Library in
Dublin in the early 1970’s. When I first
began working on Athy’s history the immediate difficulty I faced was trying to
identify where I could extract information relevant to this history of the
town. Michael Kavanagh’s book was a
great starting point as it identified all publications in both books or
periodicals relating to the County of Kildare and thanks to Michael’s
meticulous research I was able to extract much information on the town.
For an amateur researcher such as myself there was quite a great
deal of trial and error, sometimes chasing a reference down a blind alleyway,
but invariable there was always the joy of finding some nugget of information
long forgotten about the town. I can
recall long hours in the reading room of the National Library hunched over the microfiche
readers while I carefully read through old issues of the Nationalist!
What I didn’t truly appreciate and only really did when my family
and I moved to Athy in 1982 was that much information still remained within the
living memory of the inhabitants of the town.
Sometimes there was a story retold from father to son or perhaps a
document preserved carefully in the family’s possession but all this information
has gradually informed my writings and research into the town’s history over
the last 40 years.
There is no doubt that the advent of the internet has allowed local
history studies to blossom in a way that I could not have foreseen more than 40
years ago. The modern researcher can
access census records, valuation office records, army records at the touch of a
button. The recent release from the
military archives of the records of those who served in the War of Independence
has been an absolute boon, not only for professional historians, but for the
families who now have a greater sense of what their grandparents and great
grandparents did more than a century ago.
At the same time this commitment to the digitisation of our records
has its downside. The accessibility of
the internet also makes it very ephemeral. How many of us have gone on holidays with a
digital camera, taken a multitude of photographs and have yet to print one off?
How often have we viewed a picture in a family album of relations long dead and
now unknown to us for the sake of a label?
This is something we must bear in mind for future generations. I am aware that the National Library has a
policy of “harvesting” websites to be stored digitally but like all technology
time overtakes it and there is always a fear that the technology of today will
not be recognised by the technology of tomorrow and these records may no longer
be accessible to us.
With the introduction of the e-book many years ago, we were led to
believe that it sounded the death knell for the printed book, but I am confident
that the dictionaries, anthologies, bibliographies and encyclopaedias which
grace my shelves and punctuate my research will assist me in many years to
come.
Few communities are as fortunate as we are in having a full time
museum in our town which has been assiduous over the last 20 years in
collecting and recording the town’s historical development. It is something that is very easy to take for
granted but it is important that we continue to support the museum. I am often surprised that the first time many
of our towns inhabitants cross the threshold of the museum is when they are
showing it to a friend or relation from abroad.
It is an important resource that we must not neglect and I would encourage
both young and old to use the museum as often as possible. The museum’s latest exhibition “By Endurance
We Conquer – Shackleton’s Men” will be opened at 2.30pm on the 30th
of August next, just after the unveiling of the statue of Ernest Shackleton at
Emily Square, Athy. All are welcome to
attend.
No comments:
Post a Comment