Family history research in Ireland, particularly after the destruction of so many Irish records during the Civil War, requires that ‘no stone be left unturned’ in the search for our ancestors. However, there is one significant collection of records, documenting the break-up of Irish landed estates and the transfer of land to tenants, that is for the most part inaccessible.
Irish genealogists and historians have been campaigning for decades for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to open the archives of the Irish Land Commission, a veritable treasure trove of material documenting centuries of ownership and occupancy of property in Ireland.
In 1881, the first Irish Land Law Act was introduced in response to the actions of the Land League, established in Mayo in 1879 by Michael Davitt. The League called for the ‘Three Fs’ – fair rent, freedom of sale and fixity of tenure – and mounted a nationwide campaign of aggressive agitation against landlords. The Land Law Act addressed some of the Land League’s demands, and established the Land Commission to adjudicate fair rents for tenants.
The initial role of the Land Commission was to act as a regulator of fair rents. However, by the 1890s, it was administering the large-scale transfer of Irish landed estates into the hands of tenant purchasers, who used loans obtained from the British government to purchase the land they leased.
Following Independence, the Land Commission continued, by buying and redistributing land in various phases of rural redevelopment and reform. It was dissolved in the 1990s, leaving a closed archive of tens of thousands of boxes of transactions, deeds, copies of title, wills, rentals, inspectors’ reports, maps and other documents.
As the campaign to open the archive continues, peripheral items pertaining to the work of the Land Commission are beginning to appear online.
The annual published returns of adjudicated rents, commencing in 1882, have been indexed at Ancestry in the collection ‘Ireland, Judicial Rents, 1882–1902’ and include tenants’ names, addresses and landlords, but are missing the revised rent and acreage.
On Findmypast, the record set ‘Ireland, Land Commission Advances, 1891–1920’ is an index, with images, of most of the same published returns, along with those of later Land Commission advances – money loaned to tenants to purchase their property. Used in conjunction with Griffith’s Valuation and the 1901 and 1911 censuses, these records can confirm a family address, identifying the head of household at a specific time and the rent paid to their named landlord.
The National Library of Ireland (NLI) has published digitised images of the Keane Index. Dr Edward Keane created a cross-referenced index of pre-1909 landed estate records gathered by the Land Commission while overseeing the sale of Ireland’s landed estates to tenants.
The landowner and estate are listed with a summary description of the contents of each box, such as title, wills, deeds, rentals, inspectors reports and other records. While the boxes are still inaccessible, the detailed description should establish title, and copies or substitutes of some records listed might be found in the Registry of Deeds or National Archives of Ireland.
Start with the digital images of the card index, organised by county, estate or name, for the Land Commission reference to the summary description. The typescript summary descriptions, also digitised, are where the detailed list of records collected for each estate can be found. This collection is only useful for those who are researching Ireland’s landed gentry, rather than tenant farmers.
In 1923, following the partition of Ireland, Land Commission files pertaining to estates in Northern Ireland were transferred to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and are entirely open to researchers. The collection can be identified with the reference LR1 (Land Registry) in the PRONI Catalogue and includes the reports of inspectors who visited farms of applicant tenants, to ascertain their ability to pay off the loan they required to purchase their property. This material has not been digitised and can only be accessed in PRONI.
The Land Commission archive will be opened eventually, but when it is, it could still take over a decade to make it fully accessible to the public.
