Hello William IRVINE died Kenmare, Kerry 1841, I know he had a will as it was mentioned in a newspaper article in 1862. Would appreciate if anyone could tell me where I might be able to purchase this Will? Many thanks Helen

To make a long story short, most Irish wills were destroyed in the bombing of the Four Courts Building in Dubling during the Irish Civil War in 1922. Apparently all wills and many other legal documents had been moved there from the individual counties for safe keeping. There have been efforts to obtain/make copies of wills from many of the large estates that had not sent their wills, or who had sent copies of their wills to Dublin. I haven't been up to snuff on this for a long time. But the Irish Genealogical Society International in Minnesota contributed financially to an effort to recover some wills. I don't know what the status of that project is. There are many indexes to wills that survived, but they don't have anything besides maybe the names and dates of the individual parties and the County in which the property was located. One of those indexes, "Phillimore & Thrift, Indexes to Irish Wills 1536-1858 over 30,000 wills" contains reference to dtwo will by two of my Reidy ancestors in Meenleitrim, Knocknagoshel, Castleisland Civil Parish in the 1750s or so. You can well imagine that I would love to see the contents of those wills. Being that they were poor and Catholic, goes without saying, I guess, I can think of only two reasons why an ancestor might have filed a will. 1. Disinherit an eldest son, normally the one who got to inherit the farm. 2. Provide a "dowery" for a son or daughter entering into religious life. But that's just a guess. I have never seen a copy of an old Irish will. It would be interesting to see a few for poor people. Ray Marshall Minneapolis Where it is still colder than blazes and we're happy that the Vikings didn't make it into the NFL finals. We get enough bad publicity because of our weather as it is. ====================== http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Courts Wikipedia: The Four Courts were seized by Commandant Ned Daly's 1st Battalion during the Easter Rising in 1916. They survived the bombardment by British artillery that destroyed large parts of the city centre. Part of the original Gandon-designed interior decoration of the dome, lost in the 1922 destruction. On 14 April 1922 they were occupied by Republican forces led by Rory O'Connor who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. After several months of a stand-off, the new Provisional Government attacked the building to dislodge the rebels, on the advice of the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Army, Michael Collins. This provoked a week of fighting in Dublin. In the process of the bombardment the historic building was destroyed. Most dramatically however, when the anti-Treaty contingent were surrendering, the west wing of the building was obliterated in a huge explosion, destroying the Irish Public Record Office which was located at the rear of the building. It has been alleged that the Republicans deliberately booby-trapped its priceless Irish archives, which were stored in the basement of the Four Courts. Nearly one thousand years of irreplaceable archives were destroyed by this act. However, the insurgents, who included future Irish Taoiseach Sean Lemass denied this accusation and argued that while they had used the archive as a store of their ammunition, they had not deliberately mined it. They suggest that that the explosion was caused by the accidental detonation of their ammunition store during the fighting. ============================= http://www.from-ireland.net/gene/wills.htm The original Public Records Office of Ireland was located in the Four Courts complex and this was destroyed by fire during the 1922 Civil War. The vast majority of records deposited in the PRO at that time were also destroyed. These include: All original wills of the Consistorial and Prerogative Courts, with the exception of one Consistorial Will and eleven prerogative Wills. Almost all the Will and Grant Bond Books of the Consistorial and Prerogative Courts All the original wills and grants of the Principle and District Registries from 1858 up to 1903/1900 and most of the Will and Grant books of the principle registry from 1858. The PRO set about replacing as much of its lost material as possible by asking and begin given as many copies of original documents as possible from legal firms and individuals, plus notes and research carried out by historians and genealogists at the PRO prior to 1922. Such works include; Betham Abstracts Gertrude Thrift Philip Crossle Ignatius Jennings Tennison Groves Edmund Walsh Kelly ============================ ============================ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of paul and helen Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 1:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [IRL-KERRY] Wills ================= ================== Hello William IRVINE died Kenmare, Kerry 1841, I know he had a will as it was mentioned in a newspaper article in 1862. Would appreciate if anyone could tell me where I might be able to purchase this Will? Many thanks Helen _______________ ---------------