On October 22, Delbarton World Languages teacher Dr. Theresa O’Byrne was in Dublin presenting Doorways into the Past: Two Cook Street Properties of the Guild of St. Anne at the Royal Irish Academy's event celebrating the online release of around 900 deeds from Dublin's Guild of St. Anne on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) website. 

She shared the stage with eminent Irish historian Colm Lennon, who gave a talk on the early modern history of the Guild and how it survived the Reformation and even continue clandestine Catholic practices when so many religious guilds were disbanded. As lead historian and paleographer for the project, O'Byrne's talk traced some properties that the Guild owned on Cook Street from 1300-1800 using information in the Guild documents. Among audience members was Delbarton friend Brother Colmán Ó Clabaigh from Glenstal Abbey in Limerick. "It was delightful to see him!", says O'Byrne.

Building the VRTI has been a massive undertaking employing the skills and tenacity of researchers around the world, including our very own Dr. O’Byrne.  Last year, The New York Times shared this article detailing the Treasury's origin story. 

On June 30, 1922, British and Irish forces were fighting near Dublin’s main court complex. Suddenly part of the complex, the National Public Record Office, was rocked by a massive explosion. Destroyed in the resulting fire were property deeds, tax receipts, legal and church documents, financial data, census returns, state secrets and more dating back to the Middle Ages. 700 years of Irish historical documents were wiped out in an instant.

But all was not lost. As the NYT reported, “Over the past seven years, a team of historians, librarians and computer experts based at Trinity has located duplicates for a quarter of a million pages of these lost records in forgotten volumes housed at far-flung libraries and archives, including several in the United States. The team then creates digital copies of any documents that it finds for inclusion in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, an online reconstruction of the archive.”

Below is one example shared by the NYT, a leather pouch currently in the UK's National Archives that transported parchment account receipts in the early 1290s from Dublin to London. 

O’Byrne’s personal research focused on 900 deeds dating from 1275-1798 and are a veritable treasure trove of information about the history and growth of western Dublin. She has worked on this project for the past two years in her free time as lead researcher, helping a team produce a searchable English-language catalog of the (mostly) Latin deeds. The VRTI hosts high-resolution images of each deed, plus an English description of the contents. A teaser visual essay on women's marks and seals can be found here. Below is the seal of The Guild of St. Anne. O'Byrne writes, "The founding charter of the Guild of St. Anne provides for a guild comprising both men and women dedicated to St. Anne, the mother of Mary. The leadership of the Guild throughout its history, particularly the master and two wardens of the Guild, was predominantly male, however, the Guild had many female members, and by the late 16th century several women were taking an active role in Guild governance, acting as witnesses on legal documents."

Times have changed. O'Byrne writes, "In medieval English law, a woman's right to own and control property was curtailed and controlled by the men in her life: first her father, then her husband... Women acting alone, even as wealthy widows, were exceptions to the normal rule of law."

O'Byrne also recently published an article on Anglo-Irish notaries working for the Archbishops of Armagh in the 15th c. that is available on the VRTI website here.

Today, freshly back from her presentation in Dublin, what is O’Byrne’s next step? She says, “I'm taking a victory lap right now with the Guild documents, and I'm not sure what my next project will be, but I am continuing to work on a database of Anglo-Irish notaries active between ca. 1200-1650.”

Click here for the Royal Irish Academy's official press release from the October 22 event.  The Delbarton community salutes Dr. Theresa O’Byrne for contributing her significant research skills to such a worthy cause!