Finding Your Irish Roots: The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland
10 December 2025
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Eastern
Presenters: Dr. Ciarán Wallace, Co-Director and Dr. Brian Gurrin, Research Lead on Census and Population Records for The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland
Free webinar open to all
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) is an international research partnership working to virtually reconstruct the records lost in the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922. Based in Trinity College Dublin, the Virtual Treasury contains over 350,000 replacement records shared by partner archives and libraries around the globe. In June 2025 it launched a new Population Portal bringing together extensive genealogical resources into one location.Join APG on 10 December 2025 for a webinar featuring Dr. Ciarán Wallace, Co-Director of the VRTI and Dr. Brian Gurrin, Research Lead on Census and Population Records, who will explain archival tragedy and reconstruction, and demonstrate the many genealogical resources available on the free research platform. APG is pleased to be a supporter of the preservation efforts of the VRTI.
Caption: The above image is a damaged 1821 census record, a rare survivor retrieved from the rubble in 1922. Photo credit: National Archives, Ireland. Available at https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/NAI-CEN-1821-54-5
Register for the webinar
About the Presenters:
Ciarán Wallace is Co-Director of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI), an international partnership working to restore seven centuries of Irish historical records destroyed in the Battle of the Four Courts, Dublin, in 1922. This free online resource has gathered over 350,000 replacement records to date. Ciarán completed his PhD on Dublin's municipal politics at Trinity College Dublin (2010), where he subsequently held a Government of Ireland Post-doctoral Fellowship. Having lectured at universities in Ireland and Britain, he returned to Dublin in 2016 at the start of the Virtual Treasury’s work. Ciarán has published on social history, urban history, archives, and on Irish political cartoons. His book on Meath: the Irish Revolution (1912 – 1923) was launched was launched in October 2025.Brian Gurrin is the census specialist on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland project. Brian has written extensively on census taking in Ireland and is interested in the demographics of Ireland, and its regions, in the pre-Famine period, with a particular interest in religious demographics. His research during the Virtual Treasury project has seen the names and details of more than 80,000 individuals, recorded in the lost nineteenth-century censuses of Ireland, being identified and introduced into the Virtual Treasury’s Population Portal. His joint authored (with Kerby Miller and Liam Kennedy) volume, The Irish religious censuses of the 1760s, was published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in 2022. His joint authored (with Liam Kennedy, Donald MacRaild and Lewis Darwen) volume, The Death Census of Black ’47: eyewitness accounts of Ireland’s Great Famine, was published in 2023.
