The Burning of History – The Four Courts Fire of 30 June 1922

I recently needed to seek out a source from 1616, which was mentioned in a secondary reference of 1867. The primary source was the Chancery Rolls for 1616. Disastrously, they were all destroyed in Dublin in 1922. Find out more here. 

"When Dublin’s Four Courts went up in flames on June 30th, 1922, seven centuries of Ireland’s historical and genealogical records, stored in a magnificent six-story Victorian archive building known as the Record Treasury, were lost. In one afternoon, hundreds of thousands of English Government records concerning Ireland, dating back to the 13th century, were destroyed - seemingly forever." – from IrishCentral.com

• Visit www.Beyond2022.ie

A Gooseberry charm for a sty in the eye, (1896)

'...In the country districts around Belfast, and probably in other parts of Ireland, there is an old and popular method of treating a complaint occurring on edge of eyelids popularly called "a sty" or "stihan" i.e., by puncturing, or pointing at the little abscess with a thorn yet firmly believed in by the peasantry. I have never been able to discover the origin of this method of treatment. Why the thorn should always be that of a gooseberry bush is peculiar. Sometimes one from an ordinary white thorn is used, but the former is preferred, and said to be more efficacious, especially so if the "sty" be pricked through a gold ring. In County Down, a gooseberry thorn is pointed nine times at the "sty" quite close, but not touching, and then the thorn thrown over the left shoulder...'

– Ulster Journal of Archaeology (1896)