Sir, – The launch of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is to be welcomed, reassembling as it does for free online examination surviving portions of the national archives destroyed in the Four Courts in June 1922.
Your account of the launch (News, June 28th) claims that a list of documents in the soon to be destroyed Public Record Office was “contained in a single 300-page manuscript” compiled by Herbert Wood in 1919, which was “unpublished”.
In fact, Wood’s Guide to the Records Deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland was duly published by HMSO in Dublin in 1919. In addition to hard copies held in major libraries, some digitised versions of Wood’s guide have been placed online, including one by myself with a detailed prefatory essay, at sjbmurphy.com. – Yours, etc,
SEAN MURPHY,
Windgates,
Co Wicklow.