Have you ever wondered what your town was like before the Famine? How many people lived there? Had they a postal service? How many distilleries, breweries and flour mills were there? Did any houses have modern slate roofs? Was there a spa, a bank, a school?
One wonderful book, first published in 1837, has all the answers, and more besides: A Topographical Dictionary Of Ireland, compiled by the London publisher Samuel Lewis. So useful is the dictionary that it has frequently been republished; now it is also available on CD-ROM.
"Lewis", as it is affectionately known, is a gazetteer packed with histories and descriptions of 3,250 Irish cities, towns and villages, starting at Abbey, a village in "the barony of Burren", and finishing, some 1,400 pages later, at Youghal-Arra in Co Tipperary. There are also histories of each of the 32 counties, incorporating data from the census of 1831.
The work spans two large volumes - a smaller, third volume contained 32 county maps - and paints an absorbing portrait of pre-Famine Ireland. It has long been popular with historians and genealogy researchers, and the reference section of your local library probably has a well-thumbed copy.
Dip in and discover a wealth of fascinating information about life in Ireland in the 1830s. If, for example, you thought that bright yellow fields of oilseed rape were a late-20th-century introduction, think again. Rape - or colza - was widely grown in Ireland in the early 1800s; the seeds were crushed at local oil mills and the resulting liquid used for lamps - in homes and even lighthouses - and as an ingredient for soap, margarine and industrial lubricants. According to Lewis, the crop was extensively grown around Monasterevin, for example; the hamlet of Rapemills, near Banagher in "King's County", or Offaly, was named for its oil mills.
Clifden is not a long-established Connemara settlement but a "new town", begun from scratch in 1810 by John D'Arcy, a Galway landlord. In 1815, there was still just one house, but 20 years later, Clifden boasted 800 houses and 1,257 inhabitants, who were well served by chapels, a national school, a daily postal service to Galway, a dispensary and fever hospital, a hotel, a bridewell and a constabulary. A road to Galway (now the N59) had been built in the 1820s, as had a quay, and there was already an export trade to Liverpool.
Among the many other places established about the same time were the cotton-mill towns of Stratford-on-Slaney in Wicklow and Prosperous in Kildare. Lewis reports that Stratford-on-Slaney was begun in 1790 by Edward Stratford, the second earl of Aldborough, and by 1837, the town had 2,833 inhabitants, a market every Tuesday and Saturday and a large cotton-printing works, where 1,000 people produced 2,000 pieces of fabric a week.
The optimistically named Prosperous, however, founded in 1780 by the enterprising landowner Robert Brooke, failed to live up to its name. The mill employed 1,500 for a time; but by 1786, Brooke was bankrupt, and by 1837, Lewis had written off Prosperous as "little more than a pile of ruins . . . \with no\ reasonable hope of its revival".
This detailed information was collected from local sources, a task that took many years. Fortunately, 10,000 subscribers bought the book in advance. All are gratefully named in the introduction, a fascinating list of the great and good, including local clerics, scholars and professionals, Queen Victoria, the emperor of all the Russias and the king of Sweden and Norway.
You can buy a US facsimile edition on the Web for about $85, while Collins Press in Cork has just published Lewis's Dublin, compiled by Christopher Ryan, which pulls together the entries for Dublin city and county.
Family Tree Maker, a US genealogy company, produces a CD-ROM version that includes Lewis's topographical dictionaries of England (published in 1831) and Scotland (1851) - for £29 sterling, including airmail delivery and technical help.
The pages have merely been scanned in for the CD-ROM, but they are indexed by place name: key in Tuam, and the system will list the 15 pages where Tuam is mentioned; you then select which one to view. Unfortunately, the system does not identify the main Tuam entry - so it helps to know that volume I of the Irish dictionary covers A-G; volume II, H-Y - and, sadly, you cannot search by subject. These limitations aside, the CD still seems good value; schools should find it a useful resource, and it will bring this wonderful book to a wider audience.
Lewis' Dublin, ed. Christopher Ryan, is published by Collins Press, £11.99; Topographical Dictionaries: Gazetteers of England, Scotland & Ireland, is published on CD-ROM by Family Tree Maker, £29 including postage and packaging (available from TWR Computing, 0044-1284-828271, www.twrcomputing.co.uk)
Ingenious Ireland, Mary Mulvihill's guide to our scientific and industrial heritage, is being published by Town House & Country House