Colin Salter has previously shared his research about his ancestor, Paul Brasier who first brought the Brasier family to Ireland and was involved in the building of a riverside wharf in Coleraine.

And you can read the story of another settler, George Canning, the Ironmongers’ Company’s first agent here.

There must be lots of other stories out there about people and places in the Great Parchment Book – if you have one, please let us know!

And it you want help with tracking down online resources, we’ve got lots of articles and links to help you find your way around on the Great Parchment Book website. For example, have you checked out PRONI’s guides? Or do you know about other records online such as the 1641 Depositions – witness testimonies, mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion?

And finally, if you are not already a subscriber, please do consider subscribing to the blog, so you can keep up to date.

And it’s also good news for our partners Derry City & Strabane Museum and Visitor Services. Statistics recently received record that to 31 December 2017 nearly one and a half million visits (1,479,598 to be precise) had been made to the to the Plantation, People, Perspectives exhibition in Derry Guildhall. Just to put this in perspective and indicate the impact of the exhibition, this figure is many times the population of Derry itself and more than three quarters of the population of Northern Ireland. The exhibition is still going strong and we look forward to this year’s figures.

So, if you have done research based on the Great Parchment Book, why not share it more widely on this blog? Please contact the editor via ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk for more information.

And finally, here are the updated statistics for the Great Parchment Book by numbers:

• 1 Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society
• 165 folios and fragments, stored in 30 bespoke boxes (originally 16)
• 11 Great Twelve livery companies’ holdings recorded (should be 12, but the Merchant Taylors’ portion is missing)
• 1095 personal names indexed on the website including variations in spelling
• 992 place names indexed also including variations
• 49 occupations and titles recorded such as barber-surgeon, fellmonger, muster master and winecowper
• 120 entries in the glossary including occupations and titles, but also terms such as ballibetagh, creete, kill house, rampier, standall and vayle
• Over 160,000 page views of Great Parchment Book website and blog to 9 November 2018
• 148 blog posts published including this one
• 270,000 visitors to Plantation, People, Perspectives exhibition in Derry Guildhall in the first year (opened 30 May 2013) when an original folio of the Great Parchment Book was on display. Nearly one and a half million visitors (1,479,598 to be precise) to the exhibition to 31 December 2017 (many times the population of Derry and over three quarters of the population of Northern Ireland). Still going strong.
• 37 downloads in 7 countries across 3 continents of the Open Access set of 326 XML documents containing encoded transcriptions of the individual folios (2.56MB of data)
• 6 presentations about the project in countries outside the UK across 3 continents, and innumberable links from other websites across the world
• 20 project partners including 14 funders
• 4 awards, 3 shortlisted/finalist, 1 highly commended
• 1 inscription on UK Memory of the World Register (inscribed on 21 June 2016)

All summed up as 1 unique record of the 17th century Plantation of Ulster.

To mark the anniversary, we’re again taking a look at the project through numbers, from the names in the surviving folios of the book itself to the visitors to the website with some interesting facts along the way.

• 1 Great Parchment Book of The Honourable The Irish Society
• 165 folios and fragments, stored in 30 bespoke boxes (originally 16)
• 11 Great Twelve livery companies’ holdings recorded (should be 12, but the Merchant Taylors’ portion is missing)
• 1095 personal names indexed on the website including variations in spelling
• 992 place names indexed also including variations
• 49 occupations and titles recorded such as barber-surgeon, fellmonger, muster master and winecowper
• 120 entries in the glossary including occupations and titles, but also terms such as ballibetagh, creete, kill house, rampier, standall and vayle
• Over 150,000 page views of Great Parchment Book website and blog to 30 May 2018
• 147 blog posts published including this one
• 270,000 visitors to Plantation, People, Perspectives exhibition in Derry Guildhall in the first year (opened 30 May 2013) when an original folio of the Great Parchment Book was on display. Almost 960,000 visitors to the exhibition to 30 May 2016 (several times the population of Derry and nearly half the population of Northern Ireland). Still going strong.
• 33 downloads in 6 countries across 3 continents of the Open Access set of 326 XML documents containing encoded transcriptions of the individual folios (2.56MB of data)
• 6 presentations about the project in countries outside the UK across 3 continents, and innumberable links from other websites across the world
• 20 project partners including 14 funders
• 4 awards, 3 shortlisted/finalist, 1 highly commended
• 1 inscription on UK Memory of the World Register (inscribed on 21 June 2016)

All summed up as 1 unique record of the 17th century Plantation of Ulster.

International interest in the Great Parchment Book continues unabated and here we share two recent connections with projects and programmes in France and Finland.

Les rescapés du feu

Colleagues in France were very interested to find out more about the digital reconstruction of the Great Parchment Book and invited the project to present at a study day in Chartres on 17 November 2017 entitled Les rescapés du feu: L’imagerie scientifique au service des manuscrits de Chartres (Fire survivors: Contribution of imaging techniques to the study of Chartres manuscripts).

The parchment collection at the heart of the study day has many parallels to the Great Parchment Book, being a form of doomsday book of the region of Chartres, and having fallen victim to a fire. The Municipal Library at Chartres was one of the great European libraries and home to a prestigious manuscript collection dating from the 11th century. On 26 May 1944 the library was bombed and fire destroyed many of the manuscripts. However, 220 of the 518 medieval manuscripts survived; some are almost intact, others as charred blocks or shrivelled fragments. Extremely fragile and often difficult to identify, the manuscripts remained inaccessible to researchers for more than seventy years.

The project REMAC – A la REcherche des MAnuscrits de Chartres – got underway this year. Like the Great Parchment Book project, the collaborative research has brought together a range of experts to work on the use of different imaging techniques to retrieve the written content in the damaged manuscripts. In parallel, research is being undertaken to set up new imaging and microscopy techniques to assess the degradation of parchment.

The study day aimed to present the research project from the perspective of historians, imaging scientists and conservators. It also included presentations from other research teams in Europe concerned with improving the accessibility and conservation of damaged manuscripts which is where the Great Parchment Book came in.

Tim Weyrich, Professor of Visual Computing and Deputy Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) from project partner UCL, delivered a well-received presentation (in French!) on the Great Parchment Book at the study day. We hope that this will be available online in due course along with all the other presentations (watch this space).

Finland’s DIGIHUM programme

Tim has also been making connections with Finnish digital humanities researchers. On 4 October 2017 UCLDH were delighted to meet with delegates from the Academy of Finland’s multidisciplinary DIGIHUM programme, with the aim of sharing the latest British and Finnish research in digital humanities, and strengthening collaborations between the two. UCLDH presented on three projects including the Great Parchment Book.

Patricia Stewart transcribing a folio

The dataset has been made available as a source for the historical and social geographical scholarly community, to allow others to use the dataset for their own research. The files include transcription of the folios and XML coding using the Great Parchment Book schema created under the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) on oXygen XML Editor Professional software version 14; the data set is 2.56MB in total.

The data is provided with a Creative Commons Attribution-non Commercial (CC BY NC 3.0) licence. LMA and UCL would be delighted to be kept informed of how and in what context this data is being used, so do please get in touch. More information about using the data and contact details are available via UCL Discovery (use link above).

The final piece of the jigsaw is now in place. The XML dataset joins the transcriptions and digitally enhanced images available here on the Great Parchment Book website, and the free software and main academic outputs, including the complete overview of the project published in Oxford University Press’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities journal. Together these provide full and publicly accessible documentation of this significant 17th century source for the history of the Plantation recognised by UNESCO, and of the project (conservation, transcription and digital reconstruction)which not only made it accessible to researchers for the first time in 200 years, but has provided a digital reconstruction solution for similarly fire-damaged historic parchment.

The website was launched on 30 May 2013 immediately prior to the opening of the  exhibition “Plantation: Process, people, perspectives” in Derry Guildhall  in June 2013 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the building of the city walls in the year that Derry-Londonderry celebrated being the UK’s first City of Culture. The digitally reconstructed manuscript, accessible for the first time in over 200 years via the dedicated website, took pride of place in the exhibition which has proved to be a great success and still running today.

Here’s looking forward to at least 150,000 views before 30 May 2018 when we will be 5 years old!

We also celebrated the anniversary with a curator’s talk on the Great Parchment Book in the Heritage Gallery at Guildhall, where three folios of the book are on display, on the first ever London History Day today (31 May). This event was also part of  a programme celebrating the 950th anniversary of the City of London Corporation’s extensive archives in 2017. The members of the small, but attentive audience had obviously done their research before hand and had lots of interesting questions. Several were going on to other London History Day events in the City of London and beyond, including at London Metropolitan Archives. It is great to be able to showcase some of the archival treasures held by the City of London as part of this new venture.

A piper from the 1st Battalion the Irish Guards provided a musical accompaniment to the start of the evening, before guests were welcomed by The Reverend Sir George Newton, Bt, Master of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers. Quietly passionate speeches from Alderman Sir David Wootton, Governor of the Irish Society and Deputy Henry Pollard, Deputy Governor followed, with Mr William Charnley, master of the Worshipful Company of Drapers talking about his own company’s contribution to charitable causes in Northern Ireland through the Irish Society. The Girdlers’ Company Beadle, Robert Young, was master of ceremonies and cheerfully, but firmly kept us all in order.

There was much interest in the folios of the Great Parchment Book on display. The City of London, eight of the Great Twelve of the City of London livery companies and the Irish Society had all contributed to the project to conserve and digitally reconstruct the book, and it was a pleasure to talk about this important source for the history of Northern Ireland, and the project to make it accessible again after 200 years, to members of the livery companies which are represented in the book.

The two folios displayed were of Fishmongers’ Company lands (folios F7v and F8r) chosen as much for their physical appearance (distortion, shrunken text, evidence of singeing) as much as content. A modern transcription of the pages taken from the Great Parchment Book website was supplied. The folios were carefully presented under a bespoke Perspex dome sitting on the Tyvek sheets which usually support them in their bespoke packaging. This gave guests the rare opportunity to view the original folios at close quarters, at the same time keeping them safe. Philippa Smith from London Metropolitan Archives was on hand throughout the evening to keep a close eye on the folios as well as to answer questions.

Thanks go to Robert Young, Beadle of the Girdlers’ Company and his staff for looking after the folios in secure storage before the after the event, and to the support of the Irish Society, especially Edward Montgomery, Secretary, who had suggested London Metropolitan Archives should bring the folios along to the event.

Charlie commented afterwards that one of the themes that emerged from the symposium was that physical and digital often go hand in hand and continue to have a relationship – this came out in various papers. The Great Parchment Book presentation captured that perfectly – seeing the transformation from shrivelled parchment to digital image was a real wow for the audience. The audience also got the pathos of the membranes being preserved for 200 years just in case they could be made accessible one day.

One attendee was very pleased that the Great Parchment Book website features both the before and after shots of the folios as other projects only show the digitally enhanced images which is not as useful as having both.

That the presentation was very well received is reflected in the contemporaneous comments on Twitter of which a selection is given below:

• Fantastic #GreatParchmentBook project presented by @CharlieTurpie @LdnMetArchives #EDCR2016 Loved the poppadoms analogy!
• Gasp from audience as @CharlieTurpie shows an image of the #greatparchmentbook fragments in a box. Yikes! #edcr2016
• ‘a mass of scorched and dirty fragments’ – tricky task to create a digitised version of the #greatparchmentbook #EDCR2016
• Project allows users to navigate and flatten digital images to digitally uncover the text within. Cool! #greatparchmentbook #edcr2016
• Digital reconstruction to enable access is fab; book & its contents are also significant for local community #edcr2016 #greatparchmentbook
• Definitive article on fascinating #greatparchmentbook released today! Can’t wait to read more on it after #EDCR2016
• #greatparchmentbook is such an awesome project!

You can catch up with the Great Parchment Book project on Twitter by using the hashtag #greatparchmentbook.

The paper, published in Oxford University Press’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities journal, is freely available online. At the time of writing it is doing very well online and is already in the top 5% of papers in Altmetric (which tracks online research outputs), and 99th centile for attention; it is the number one output from digital scholarship in the humanities.

Great Parchment Book in Finland

The Great Parchment Book’s world tour continued with Tim Weyrich, Professor of Visual Computing, Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Group, Department of Computer Science, University College London, lead of the project digital acquisition and reconstruction, giving the keynote at SyysGraph 2016, the Finnish computer graphics scene’s leading annual event, the previous evening. His talk on Problem-Aware Digitization of Cultural Heritage Artifacts featured the Great Parchment Book as one of the case studies and he was able to promote the paper which was published the following day.

The paper, published in Oxford University Press’s Digital Scholarship in the Humanities journal, presents a complete overview of the project, detailing the conservation, digital acquisition, and digital reconstruction methods used. It is freely available in open access, meaning anyone can read the details of the project, and see our images and videos to understand the scope and scale of the project, and its contribution to the restoration of the Great Parchment Book. It is freely available online.

Note: Please use the hashtag #greatparchmentbook when referring to the project on social media.

Significance of the project for some of the key partners

Professor Tim Weyrich, Professor of Visual Computing, Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Group, Department of Computer Science, University College London, lead of the digital acquisition and reconstruction said: “I feel privileged having been able to conduct computer science and imaging research in the context of a project of such cultural importance. We were fortunate enough that the engagement with the humanities’ unique problem domain allowed us to go beyond mere application of known techniques, pushing the boundary in our own research field while making a tangible difference to the wider public.”

Edward Montgomery, Secretary of The Honourable The Irish Society, said: “We are delighted that The Honourable The Irish Society has been part of a major collaborative project to bring The Great Parchment Book, one of its most historic documents, ‘back to life’. The Book is a marvellous testament to history and provides a detailed account from 1639 of the City of London’s role in the Plantation of Ulster and its administration. It is a valuable tool for anyone interested in their ancestral history within Ulster and an excellent teaching aid for those exploring early modern Ireland.”

Geoff Pick, Director of London Metropolitan Archives said: “The City of London Corporation, through London Metropolitan Archives, has been delighted to be a major partner in the Great Parchment Book project, one of the most innovative in the archive sector in recent years.  It places great value on the Book, not least in helping the City’s support for the 400th anniversary of the building of Derry’s city walls in 2013 and the state visit to London of the President of Ireland in 2014.   The Book has also been recognised by UNESCO as being of outstanding national importance this year when it was inscribed on the UK Memory of the World Register, the first on the Register concerning Northern Ireland.”

Professor Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities said: “It has been a pleasure to work on this project, which has brought together expertise from so many different angles, allowing us to finally provide advanced access to this important, but very damaged, document. The conservation, imaging, and reconstruction have all contributed to the creation of a digital resource of lasting value for researchers, students, and the wider public. Our work encourages further understanding of the role of the City of London in the plantation, and the importance of the Great Parchment Book to its local, national, and international contexts. It also shows us the benefits of undertaking advanced digital projects in the area of cultural heritage.”

Full citation details

Pal, K., Avery, N., Boston, P., Campagnolo, A., De Stefani, C., Matheson-Pollock, H., Panozzo, D., Payne, M., Schüller, C., Sanderson, C., Scott, C., Smith, P., Smither, R., Sorkine-Hornung, O., Stewart, A., Stewart, E., Stewart, P., Terras, M., Walsh, B., Ward, L., Yamada, L., Weyrich, T. (2016). “Digitally reconstructing the Great Parchment Book: 3D recovery of fire-damaged historical documents” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Oxford University Press.

The audience was excited to see the transformation of the Great Parchment Book and several members of the audience noted the excellence of the blog.

One member of ICA, Gerard Foley from the Archives of Western Australia, revealed that he had found two of his ancestors who had been carpenters in Londonderry.

People were pleased to learn that the products and outcome were continuing to be shared and developed.

For another view from Seoul, go to the Borthwick Institute of Archives blog post Up and AtoM: The Borthwick Institute Goes To South Korea.