Logo

What Griffith's Valuation actually is

Officially titled the Primary Valuation of Ireland, and known to almost everyone as Griffith's Valuation after Sir Richard Griffith, who oversaw the work, this survey was compiled between 1847 and 1864. Its purpose was practical rather than historical. In the years after the Great Famine, the government needed a fair and uniform basis for taxing land and property, so every holding in the country was measured, described and valued. The results were printed townland by townland, and for each tenement they record the occupier, the immediate lessor, a description of the property, its area and its rateable annual value.

For family historians, it has become something far more valuable than a tax record. It is the closest thing we have to a census for mid-nineteenth-century rural Ireland.

Why it matters so much for Irish research

Irish genealogy has a well-known hole in the middle of the nineteenth century. The census returns for 1861 and 1871 were destroyed, and those for 1851 and 1881 survive only in fragments, which means that most families cannot be traced through censuses before 1901. Parish registers, meanwhile, survive patchily, and in poorer or more remote districts they often begin surprisingly late.

Griffith's Valuation steps into that gap. Because it covers the whole country, it can place a family in a specific townland at a specific moment, and the townland is the unit that unlocks almost everything else: parish registers, estate papers, gravestone inscriptions and later census entries. Treat it as a fixed point on the map rather than a source of biography. It will not give you ages, relationships or dates of birth, but it will tell you exactly where to look next.

Reading an entry column by column

• Number and situation of the tenement: the plot number, which corresponds to a number on the accompanying six-inch map. This is how you find the precise spot your ancestors occupied.
• Occupier: the person actually holding and using the property. This is the name you are hunting for, and it is almost always the head of the household.
• Immediate lessor: the person or body from whom the occupier held the property directly. Usually the landlord, but sometimes a middleman, an agent or even a relative.
• Description of tenement: house, offices (that is, outbuildings), land, garden. A cottage with no offices tells its own story.
• Area: given in acres, roods and perches, so you can judge whether a holding was a viable farm or a patch of waste ground.
• Rateable annual valuation: separate figures for land and buildings, plus a total. Comparing totals across a townland quickly reveals who was comfortable and who was scraping by.

Maps, revision books and the paper trail

The valuation was mapped as well as written. Each townland was surveyed and printed at six inches to the mile, and the numbers in the valuation books match plot numbers on those maps. Finding the plot can be genuinely revealing: a few perches in a village describes a very different life from eighty acres of mountain grazing.

Just as importantly, the valuers kept their books up to date by hand after publication, striking out entries and writing in new occupiers, altered areas and revised figures. These revision or cancellation books run forward well into the twentieth century. They allow you to watch a holding pass between generations or change hands at a particular date, and they can bridge the gap neatly to the 1901 census.

Coping with common names and spelling

Ireland is full of repeated surnames, so searching nationally by name alone will drown you. Always search within a townland, a civil parish or a poor law union instead. A few further habits will save you hours:

• Try every spelling variant. Valuers wrote names as they heard them, so phonetic renderings are common.
• Watch the O' and Mc or Mac prefixes, which are frequently dropped in one record and restored in the next.
• Note the immediate lessor. Recurring landlord names point you towards the estate papers worth consulting.
• Be suspicious of two men of the same name in one townland. Check the plot numbers and the lessors before assuming they are the same person.

A sensible order of working

Start by establishing the townland, using a death certificate, a family story, a gravestone or a later census entry. Find that townland in the printed valuation and work patiently down the occupier column, noting everyone who might belong to your family. Then pull up the map and identify the plot, so you know precisely where the family lived.

Next, compare your findings with the tithe applotment books, compiled roughly between 1823 and 1837 and organised in much the same way. If the same surname appears on the same holding, you have pushed the family back a generation. From there, move on to the revision books and then to the 1901 census. Used in that sequence, this sober Victorian tax survey becomes one of the most useful documents an Irish family historian can consult.