The year 1919 saw the publication of a notable archival work, Herbert Wood’s Guide to the Records Deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland. Nearly all the records in the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) would be destroyed a mere three years later during the Irish Civil War in June 1922. Wood’s Guide is more than a catalogue of a lost archive, and in the age of digitisation and the Internet it is also a template for archival reconstruction.
Herbert Wood
To mark the centenary of its publication, I have made available a facsimile edition of Wood’s Guide here. (30 MB PDF file).
The republication features a prefatory essay analysing the Guide, outlining the life and work of Herbert Wood, who has hitherto not featured in biographical dictionaries, and discussing ongoing record publishing, digitising and reconstructive projects.
(Sean J Murphy MA is a genealogist, lecturer and author. See http://homepage.eircom.net/~seanjmurphy/epubs for more publications published online).
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