Based on research from the Research Ireland-funded Law versus Practice project, which uses digital tools and methods to identify and map women’s property ownership in early modern Ireland, this paper will discuss the creation of a database from an early modern printed source titled A list of the claims. Published in Dublin in 1701, the List is a printed schedule of claims submitted to the board of trustees for the Irish forfeitures between 1700 and 1703. The board was created by the Act of Resumption (1700), which was passed by the English Parliament to nullify William III’s ‘exorbitant’ grants of Irish land to military generals and personal favourites. The royal grants comprised estates that were forfeited by Irish supporters of James II, after their defeat by William and his forces in the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1689-91). Crucially, the Act of Resumption was retroactive; this meant that any person with a title to all or part of a forfeited estate that predated 13 February 1689 (the date of William III and Mary II’s accession) could submit a claim. The volume of submissions was considerable: the List of claims comprises over 3,100 claims, almost all of which were heard and adjudicated upon by a court of claims, which was presided over by the forfeiture trustees.
The List is a valuable record of property-ownership in seventeenth-century Ireland. It is also a significant source of biographical, legal and geographical information, containing details of over 4,000 named individuals, the legal basis of their ownership (e.g. deeds, marriage settlements, wills) and the geographic location of the property they claimed (i.e. townlands, parishes, baronies and counties). Using a pre-existing dataset (c based on the printed List and contained in an Excel spreadsheet), the Law versus Practice team are parsing biographical, geographical and legal data to create a relational database through MySQL. This database will ultimately enable the team to trace and, using GIS, map female property ownership across time and place. At present, the team has identified 771 women and girls, who will be assigned unique identifiers (UIDs), using the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) Knowledge Graph (KG) person schema as a template.
While the LOC dataset is a valuable foundation for the creation of a database, it is not without issues: first, the dataset is a reproduction of the original printed List and thus contains errors, contractions and inconsistencies in the spelling of names and placenames; second, numerous individuals share the same name and live or own property in close proximity to each other; and third, data is not structured to distinguish gender, or to identify instances where women have remarried and changed their name. These issues require manual intervention, through cleaning and research to establish context.
Using the LOC dataset and the Law versus Practice database as a model, this paper will explore the potential of (and the potential problems attending) datasets and databases created from early modern sources in the Irish context.