In August, the scanner arrived at the library and sat, fully boxed, outside my office door while I made travel plans for late October. I hoped that I could get as much done in two weeks this time as I did in a month the previous year. The theory was that I knew so much more, and I could hit the ground running. Mid to late October is distinctly off season, but the airline tickets were only slightly cheaper than before. Most bed and breakfast rentals were happy to hear from us, but again the prices did not go down dramatically because of the season. It appeared that the Quinnipiac facility might be a bit crowded with professors and the graduate student, so I located a cottage rental 20 minutes out of Tralee in Castlegregory. This sleepy Dingle Peninsula town was one of our favorite locations last year, and it continued to be so this time. After the initial few days of set-up and training, I mapped out a trip that would take me to County Roscommon to visit the National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park, and then for a day in Dublin to meet with others involved in the digitization of Irish historical materials (except it is important to note that they spell it "digitisation").

A colleague of my wife likes to use the expression "Man makes plans, and God laughs." So it was with the digitization mission in September when the excellent graduate student we had chosen went in for emergency gall bladder surgery. At first, she felt that she would be ship shape by the last week in October, but then we heard a series of less optimistic medical reports, culminating in the one that said that she could not go. There was not time to hire and train a replacement, so plan B looked like this. I would go for the 2 weeks already planned. In the second week, rather than supervise the student's work, I would do the scanning myself. Also, with my flight a month away, we were looking at the scanner at my office door with some trepidation, as the plans to ship it overseas were dealing with a tighter time frame. Finally, in late September, it disappeared out the back door and arrived in Ireland just a few days later. Good to go.

In the weeks before departure, we worked with Michael Costello at Kerry County Library to get a somewhat better idea of the materials we would be scanning. The Boards of Guardians were formed as a result of the 1838 Poor Laws, which called for a Board to be formed in each community, composed of leading citizens, who would supervise workhouses to hold and employ citizens who found themselves at the mercy of the state. Michael sent us a few sample pages, which were enormously educational. One of the surprises was that the minute books did not make reference to particular people going in and out of the workhouses, but concentrated on the general work involved, such as overall policies, provisions and expenses.

some of the Famine-era Minutebooks

Sample page from a "rough" Minute book.

The next day we were still a bit jetlagged, but otherwise ready for the two hour drive to Tralee. This is a pretty easy drive except for the part where you drive through Limerick. When we drove up to the Lodge at Kilteely House, we were spotted by Bob Engel and his wife Marcia who were staying in the upstairs rooms. The Lodge was much improved from last year, with a much brighter kitchen and new dishes. After dumping our luggage, we went up the path to the main house, where we were met by Brian, Kathryn, Michael and Sheba the Wonder Dog.

I had promised the Kerry County Library that I'd show up for work on Monday afternoon, so I called to make sure that the scanner was working. They told me that they were still working on it, so I gave myself the rest of the day off. We walked down the road to find the River walk, but decided to take that walk later. Later, we went on a drive out to the Peninsula, and reacquainted ourselves with Castlegregory and the beach at Fahramore.

Kerry County Library Local History scan crew

Wednesday we woke up very early and headed for County Roscommon in the central part of the island. Everything went well as we drove to Galway in about 3 hours, and then headed up the "Highway" to the North and East to find Strokestown. After about a half hour, we noticed that we were no longer on the highway and we were seeing a lot of livestock. We managed to find a sign leading to a town that was on the atlas, so we headed for that and reconnected with the road. We still made it to Strokestown at least 90 minutes before we were supposed to be there. We drove on to Longford to try and find our B&B, and then went back to the park. Donna had heard that the cafeteria at Strokestown Park was unusually good, so that's where we ate another excellent carvery lunch. While eating, we were spotted by the Park Manager John O'Driscoll who started our visit early as soon as we finished lunch. When I had called him earlier in the fall, he admitted that he had never heard of Quinnipiac, so it worked out well. We went to his office, and I showed him some of the things we had done with digitization of historical books, and he seemed quite impressed. He told us that he had always intended to digitize some of the collection, but was waiting to be approached by an institution that had done this, and Quinnipiac seemed to be the first. I said that we would be happy to offer encouragement and advice if they decided to pursue digitization. Afterwards we were given a tour of the rather magnificent mansion. The museum has a peculiar history. This was one of the last of the great Irish manors to still be owned by the families. In the 1970's the last family member left, and the estate was sold to a car dealer who simply needed the land to expand his business. When he went through the estate, he found a treasure trove of original documents pertaining to the Famine. He decided that this should be preserved, and began a long process to establish the museum. While the operation is a private corporation, it is sanctioned by the President of Ireland, so it is considered to be the closest thing to an "Official" Famine museum.

The Famine Museum in Roscommon has a substantial collection of manuscripts and art dedicated to the Famine.

Right up until early afternoon when we arrived in Avoca it was grim overcast weather. The hour we were there, the sun came out in full glory. We ate lunch at the pub, because everyone always does that, and I took Donna's picture out front because everyone does that as well. We also saw the police station and the church, but my picture of the church did't come out for some reason.

Just north of Avoca is The Meeting of the Waters, which is a famous spot immortalized in a poem by Thomas Moore.

After that, we head back north to Dublin - actually Dun Loughaire (pronounced "done leery"), at a guest house just a few blocks away from the DART station. It was a very pleasant house, and if I go back to stay there again, I'll know where it is - something that was not the case in October. We parked along the waterfront, and wandered the streets until we found a bookstore whose staff pointed out that we were just a couple of blocks from the place. Dun Loughaire is well appointed with a downtown mall, internet cafe and restaurants.

On Friday, I had two appointments in the morning. The first was revisiting Annette Kelly at the Library Council. When I had talked to her last year, the council was running a prototype web page called "askaboutireland.com," and they were about to present their case for government funding for a massive project that included grants to local public libraries for digitization projects. In the ensuing 18 months, the page was basically unchanged, so I was curious how the funding went. It turns out that it went very well, and they had distributed a million Euro to local libraries. Two of them - Meath and Donegal had even digitized some of their own Board of Guardian minute books, but neither intended to initiate comprehensive access to their contents. Instead, these were intended to be used as a springboard for information about the Famine to be distributed in web pages for the general public. One interesting item to come out of our meeting was that Annette had noticed an ad featuring our digitization work in the in flight magazine of Aer Lingus.

At the end of this talk, I needed to get back downtown to meet my wife at the National Museum, so Sean arranged for his secretaries to call a cab, and walked me down to the pickup point. After a few minutes, we realized to our horror that we had been stood up. Sean was gracious enough to drive me back downtown to make my meeting. He told me along the way that he had been the director at UCD for more than 20 years, taking the library from the typewriter age to the current situation.

Donna and I made our way to the wonderful Gallagher's Boxty House and had lunch at this mecca for authentic Irish cooking. Afterwards, we took DART back past Dun Loughaire and visited "Joyce's Tower." This was a harbor fortification that was converted to an apartment in the early twentieth century. Since it was featured in the beginning of Ulysses, it was named after the author, even though he actually lived there for less than a week.

That weekend, we spent more time in Castlegregory. A restaurant that we could never try last year because it was never open when we were there had the same problem this time. We noticed a sign on the main street pointing to a place called Phil's Cafe. We walked up the steps and found a mainly empty restaurant and Phil himself. There was a menu, but the story of Phil's is that you eat what he happened to be cooking that day. The surprise was that the food was absolutely superb - some of the best eating we would ever do in Ireland. By the time we left, every table was spoken for. Later, we found that we could park our car at the docks in Fahramore, and walk up stone steps to a coastal area that is not for the faint of heart.

On the bank holiday, we started the Ring of Kerry, and got as far as Cahirciveen and Valentia Island. There was supposed to be an active historical society in Cahirciveen, but we found out later that it was non-existent. We were interested in finding what was reputed to be the most magnificent workhouse ruin in Ireland. With the library closed for the holiday, it didn't look good for finding directions, so as a last straw, I visited a B&B and asked the people there. Within minutes, we were on our way with rock-solid good directions. The workhouse was in back of a farm, and a sign from the farmer made it clear that we were not welcome to visit the lawn in front of the ruin. I knew that Bob Smart had been closer, so I decided to find out more later.

Workhouse ruin in Cahirciveen

Workhouse ruin - designed to hold 800 paupers

Padraig Kennelly, Managing Director of the Kerrys Eye newspaper.

This sea wall was built on Tralee bay in 1850 using famine relief funds.

Hidden in the greenery near Camp on the Dingle Peninsula is an entire village abandoned during the Famine.

After the obligitory stop at the suburban TESCO grocery store on the way in, we finished the drive to the Quinnipiac facility. Everyone was wondering where we were because they thought we were coming in from Shannon in the morning. By now it was very late afternoon, and I was interested in settling for the night, but Donna reminded me that we had a piece of leftover business to finish - Bunawonder. As I turned down the narrow road to the beach, I saw that a car was sitting right in the middle of the road. A man, looking flustered, moved the car around so I could get to the beach. As we went by, we noticed a woman with him who was on the ground doing something like digging or covering up. That's odd. We went to the beach and parked our car just before a sharp drop-off that had no fence to protect your vehicle. Not a place to go at night. Remarkably, Bunawonder was the most scenic beach on Tralee Bay, hands down. We stayed for a half hour and watched the sun go down.