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General => Armed Forces => Topic started by: xpress4 on Friday 04 May 12 05:57 BST (UK)
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I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this but I'm trying to locate information about the timeline from the 1820's to 1840's when the RE were involved with the OS in the mapping of Ireland. I need to know which areas were mapped at what date. Anyone familiar with such a resource or a good place to locate it?
Many thanks!
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Not sure if it helps with a date but William Lancey was supposed to have come to Newtownlimavady, Co.Londonderry in 1829 from England. Mentioned in 1834- see here (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ypR3QWtmBRoC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=lancey+%26+limavady%23&source=bl&ots=hu4DLg7Kzh&sig=tSNZYUIDzohZp3wnRh6FfLrNzEo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eY2jT_2YKKTO4QShp_xf&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=lancey%20%26%20limavady%23&f=false).
A bit more information here about Co. Donegal, etc.-
http://www.finnvalley.ie/glenfin/other/statistical/os.html
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You may find chapter 3, from page 27 of interest....
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/docs/ebooks/map-makers-to-britain-since-1791/index.html
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Hi,
I think you could find the book by Rachel Hewitt "Map of a Nation" being the biography of the Ordnance Survey will provide the substance you are looking for. Published by Granta, ISBN 9781847080981 2010. It describes the Irish mapping quite well.
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Thanks to you all! The Flip book on the OS is really wonderful and will order Map of Nation. Haven't found what I needed yet, but great resources.
My family worked for generations for the OS and have found them in Scotland and England from the mid 1840s onward but they are from Ireland and, although I have no proof, I believe that they might have taken up with the mapping of Ireland in the 1830/1840 period. I have their county of origin and not much else so I'm trying to link them to the path of the mapping project by town where I can then search for their parish records as well as try to back up my theory about where they first joined on. I find it a fascinating path they took..however it is maddening as an amateur genealogist to trace a family that hopped around as much as they did in that line of work.
Again, many thanks!
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A book you should also consider is "A Paper Landscape" - The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. The author is J.H. Andrews and it is published by Four Courts Press, Dublin in 2002. First published by Oxford University Press in 1975.
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I'll do that, thanks! :)
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The first survey resulted in the six-inch (to a mile) series which you can still buy from OS Ireland. Each plan will have the date surveyed on, but you may be able to get it on a list from OSI. As you probably know they started in the north east and worked their way south.
Are you interested in a particular member of the Royal Engineers/Sappers and Miners?
Ken
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I am interested in this as well. My Great Uncle Thomas Small was a surveyor with the Royal Engineers and I know from census record he was in Ireland in 1911. I am ever hopeful one day I might be able to find a map drawn by him.
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Many of the maps can be found here: https://maps.nls.uk/os/#ireland
which is part of the National Library of Scotland's excellent database of their holdings of UK maps.
The Irish survey was based at Phoenix Park, Dublin which remained the HQ of OS Ireland after 1922. There are records held by the Irish National Archives: https://nationalarchives.ie/collections/
but also with the National Archives in London: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/advanced-search
(There is a drama relating to the early surveys: "The playboy of the western world" by J.M. Synge. We studied it for O level GCE, but I cannot remember much about it!)