Preserving the past for future generations...Meet the county archivist keeping out heritage safe

The reconstruction of the old St Patrick’s Classical School in Navan into a new county archive won’t come soon enough for the staff of the county library because their storage area for precious records of the county is bursting at the seams.

The county council had published proposals for the conservation, restoration and change of use of the building to an archive centre under part VIII of the Planning and Development Regulations. However, a third party has made an application to the High court seeking leave to proceed with a judicial review of the consent to proceed with the proposals. A decision from the court is awaited so nothing will happen until that is known.

At present the county archive is held in the storage area in the basement of the county library headquarters in Navan and it holds about 80 “bays” of material and within that there are between 16 and 24 shelves in each bay. That gives some idea of the extent of the archive as it stands.

When the new archive is built there will be provision for 840 shelves and it will offer just over 1,000 linear metres, the County Archivist, Patricia Fallon said in an interview this week.

Although the new building will offer storage facility well into the future, the library will be retaining the storage space at the headquarters in Railway Street. The National Archives Act came into effect in 1986 and quite a number of counties set up archives of their own, Meath’s archive being set up in 2000 and a temporary archivist was hired to cover three counties (Wicklow, Kildare and Meath) and then two shared archivists worked on archives over about eight years.

Those years were marked by a conscious effort to get an archive up and running although the county records were in existence for the previous 100 years or so. The establishment of an archive is not without cost. Up to two years ago this would have been covered within the normal library budget. There is a flux at the moment as the county council gears up towards a new county archive and decisions are expected to be made on where to set a particular budget for the archive but that’s for another day.

The management of archives and records is moving into a new phase now with the advent of GDPR and other issues. People will see that there will be a monetary value put on keeping archives in a correct and accurate manner. “County councils in particular will see that if they get a Freedom of Information request, you will need to know where your records are. It should be kept in mind that although we love taking in records, like estate records of business archives which add colour to the archives, first and foremost our duty of care is to the council records and that includes anything that’s 30 years old”, County Archivist Patricia Fallon said.

So, can the public access these records and how do they go about it? She and Tom French, Local Studies Librarian at Meath County Council, are available at the library Monday to Friday and they will take drop-in appointments or if someone wants to see a specific record the staff will liaise with them beforehand. People can also email in and get advice from the experts. There is a broad spectrum of queries. A treasure trove for researchers are the finding aids for the minute books of the Poor Law Unions of Dunshaughlin, Kells, Navan, Oldcastle and Trim.

On the day the Meath Chronicle met Patricia Fallon for interview she had just had a query from a student who wants to do a masters project relating to workhouse records. “So she had a specific request on Famine-time records and she is going to drop in to see us about that. That’s a good example of people who are interested in local history and want to track down records. Sometimes we have historians coming in to look at estate records – the Napper estate is quite popular. You might have local historians interested in a particular plot of land or the area they live in. We get quite a lot of requests for the Meath Chronicle (the Chronicle donated its bound copies dating back to 1897 to the library earlier this year). It’s really a vast range of queries”.

The library hopes to go into a digitisation programme over the next few years and this will be an added facility to researchers. In the last few weeks the county archive staff have been moving towards the digitisation of the 1926 census. These are fantastic projects that will ensure that family historians can go ahead and get information from it”, Patricia Fallon said.

The first obligation of the archive is to preserve records of the county council itself, including minute books from urban and rural councils and more modern material like county managers’ orders. Then there are workhouse records, Poor Law Union records, and some hospital records, especially from older hospitals, school records and estate records. The kind of material available from workhouses and hospitals are wardens’/matrons’/boards’ reports

In 2015 the county council bought the records of the Farrell estate in Moynalty. The archive is open to purchasing other records and it also purchases business records. The archive includes the Spicer bakery papers (“which was a fantastic collection to get”). Literary collections include the letters of Alice Curtayne and the Ledwidge collection. The oldest records in the archive are those from the Mountainstown estate.

Patricia Fallon would love to have the capacity to take in estate records that might come on the market for sale or might be offered voluntarily to the council but “the reality of where we are at presently is that we have been over 20 years now with the storage downstairs and we really are running out of space”.

Meath is a huge county with a large and very important heritage and the archive is at a stage where it needs as broad a range of material as possible and the preservation of the St Patrick’s School will be a huge step forward.