MAY 2025
The Morpeth Roll – ‘The World’s Largest Farewell Card’
Digitisation is a powerful preservation method. Not only can it protect physical items from being overhandled and damaged, but it can allow people from anywhere in the world to access and utilise incredibly old, fragile, and valuable documents that they would have no ability to view in person.
Now that we are firmly in the 21st century, there is no denying that digital technology is an intrinsic part of our lives and how we connect with each other. But it can also, crucially, help anyone, not just academics and historians, to connect with their past.
According to YouGov, genealogy was the 117th most popular leisure activity in the UK in 2024, beating out golf, horse racing, and cross stitch. The general public can and, overwhelmingly, do conduct research on their family trees using the deluge of digital resources and records that now exist online. Millions of census records, marriages, births, and deaths can be searched through from the comfort of one’s own home.
Many people don’t think about how those records ended up on their screens, not realising that it likely took a team of people, fighting with lighting equipment and handling crumbling old books with excruciating care, to preserve those records and make them almost universally accessible. Where would we be without the ability to access these documents? What valuable details of genealogical and cultural history would we be missing?
Well, there is one particular instance in which we almost found this out.
The Morpeth Roll is a historical object with a fascinating story, beginning in 1841. In 1841 George Howard, aka Lord Morpeth, stepped down from his role as the Chief Secretary for Ireland. He had been very popular in his post and was given a very special parting gift: a “petition of “outpourings of affection and support” from across the country” (Maynooth University).
During his time as Chief Secretary between 1835-1841, Lord Morpeth garnered a great deal of support from fellow politicians as well as the Irish public more generally, helping to introduce “measures to redress the imbalances between Protestant and Catholic appointees in the constabulary and magistracy” (Maynooth University).
When his time as Chief Secretary came to an end, supporters and collaborators, led by Daniel O’Connell and the Duke of Leinster, wanted to show their thanks and support for Lord Morpeth and the reform he worked towards. Within six weeks, 652 sheets of paper were sent far and wide across Ireland, accruing approximately 160,000 signatures from all over the country.
They were then attached together to make one long scroll (420 meters long, to be precise), which was then wound onto a large wooden bobbin and presented to Lord Morpeth, who was deeply touched by the gift, calling the roll ‘the richest heir-loom I could bequeath to the name I bear’ (Maynooth University).
However, after the roll had been transported to his family estate in Yorkshire, Lord Morpeth carried on with his life and political career until his death in 1864. The Morpeth Roll was forgotten, spending well over 150 years sat in the basement of Castle Howard. It was discovered in the early 2010s by Professor Christopher Ridgeway, who was excited and bewildered to rediscover the scroll and what it meant to Lord Morpeth and the history of Ireland.
The Scarcity of Pre-Famine Irish Records
Anyone who has tried to investigate any Irish ancestry in their family knows how difficult it can be to find historical records and census documents from before the Great Famine. Firstly, you have to contend with the turmoil of the Famine itself, which caused thousands of deaths and undocumented emigrations.
Secondly, most of the pre-Famine records that were kept literally “went up in smoke” (Virtual Treasury) in a fire in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, meaning that, until the 2010s, many could not find the names or census information of their ancestors or any historical figures from before 1845. But the discovery of the Morpeth Roll, found sitting forgotten in a basement, suddenly gives us handwritten proof of around 160,000 people living in Ireland before the Famine began.
“The Morpeth Roll can act as a means for contemplating questions about what it means to be Irish. By asking if the names it contains chose to stay or depart in the 1840s, or left in subsequent decades, or indeed returned at some later point, it acquires a significance that stretches long after 1841, and far beyond the shores of a single island on the western edge of Europe. It has the potential to reach out to millions of people worldwide who claim Irish descent.”
Maynooth University
A Digitisation Challenge
After careful conservation work, the Morpeth Roll was ready to undergo an incredibly important digitisation process. Maynooth University partnered with Ancestry.com to formulate a plan to digitise the entire roll, so that researchers and members of the public could track genealogical patterns further back in Irish history than had been possible before. During this planning process, our team at UK Archiving got on board, providing equipment and expertise to see through the complex digitisation process.
The complexity of this process came largely from the form and shape of the roll itself; it is “a uniquely mechanical object, presenting very special challenges for display and interpretation” (ed. Ridgeway, 2013).
This meant that our team had to devise a unique digitisation set up that would allow us to preserve the entire roll whilst maintaining proper care and handling of the roll itself. Several members of our team, including our current General Manager David Knox, spent a week on-site at the NUI Maynooth library working on this project.
They set up a digital camera capture system above a rolling table, with a bobbin placed on either side, so that the roll could be unrolled from one side and rerolled on the other. This allowed a section of the roll to be laid flat so that our camera could capture it in a high-quality digital image. Then the roll would be moved along to the next section, leaving a small amount of overlap, so that the images could be pieced together afterwards to make a continuous image of the roll’s text.
There were also important pieces of content, including written text and stamps, on the reverse of the roll, so each section was checked as the team went along, then carefully flipped to capture any important information to be included in the final digital collection.
During their week in Maynooth, our team worked hard to capture the Morpeth Roll as carefully and efficiently as possible, but they also got to enjoy some down time and local hospitality, including celebrating our manager David’s 50th birthday with colleagues from the Maynooth University library and archive staff.
At the end of the week, the entire roll had been photographed, and our team returned to our office in Edinburgh to process the images and create the 100% to scale digital versions that have been utilised since. The final images were then sent to Ancestry.com, where their team and hundreds of volunteers worked to transcribe every piece of information in the roll, so that the contents could be searchable. So now, thanks to all that care and hard work, the Morpeth Roll can be studied and searched digitally by researchers and the public, allowing the physical object to be preserved and stored securely.
Even over a decade later, this is one of the projects we are most proud of at UK Archiving. Not only does our team have great memories of the project and the collaborators we got to work with, but helping to preserve such a significant historical object is what makes our job so special and rewarding.
Watch this video produced by NUI Maynooth to find out more about the Morpeth Roll and how it was preserved:
Resources/References
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/2514
https://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0314/376639-morpeth-roll
https://archive.org/details/morpethrollirela0000unse/page/n5/mode/2up
https://virtualtreasury.ie/curated-collections/census-gleanings
https://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/irish-records-burned.html
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by Amy McVeigh | 01 May 2025
