Find your ancestors in Griffith's Survey Maps & Plans, 1847-1864

Take your family history journey a step further by discovering more about your family’s origins. Griffith’s Survey Maps and Plans are a valuable primary resource for the family historian. In this collection you can view the original Ordnance Surveys and Town plans created from 1847 to 1864. Download the images to your own computer for the best experience and add them to your family tree.

Each record includes a transcript and most also contain an image.

Transcript

The transcript will include locational details. The amount of information in each with vary, but many will include:

• Townland
• Civil parish
• Union
• Town
• Barony
• County
• Place
• Sub-division
• Ordnance Survey sheet number
• Occupant count

Other transcripts may also include:

• Ward
• Municipal borough
• Parliamentary borough
• Electoral division

For a full explanation of terms used within Griffith’s Valuation review the article, Griffith’s Valuation – Explanation of terms.

Image

• You may be able to view maps and town plans. For some areas multiple maps were created and are available.
• Move the image around in the image viewer to check for additional notes around the corners of the maps; such as, details about the town or who created the map.
• Download the image to your computer for a personal viewing experience.
• Please Note: Unfortunately we do not have maps, only transcripts, of Northern Ireland at this time (Counties: Antrim, Armagh, Londonderry, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone).

Between 1847 and 1864, Richard Griffith was responsible for carrying out the Primary Valuation of Tenements (generally referred to a Griffith's Valuation because of his role in the project). The aim of the valuation was to produce a uniform guide to the relative value of land throughout the whole of Ireland in order to decide liability to pay the Poor rate (for the support of the poor and destitute within each Poor Law union). The project required Griffith and a team of valuers to determine the value of every piece of land and property in the country enabling every occupiers' tax due to be assessed. The information they collated covering all 32 counties was compiled into over 300 volumes and published over a period of 17 years.

Discover more about these records

While Griffith's Valuation is available on a number of websites, the version you can search on Findmypast is the one developed by Eneclann Ltd, OMS Services and The National Library of Ireland and is the most complete Griffith's Primary Valuation of Ireland which includes all revisions and amendments.

No library or archive held the complete set of 301 Griffith's publications (which included new volumes were updates and amendments had been made). The National Library of Ireland and the Valuation Office have the largest collection of original volumes and other collections are held in The National Archives of Ireland, the Genealogical Office and the Gilbert Library and the private collection of George Handran. The team were able to locate 300 of the 301 publications across these and other archives. The information was then digitised and made fully searchable (by person and place name) to give you the most comprehensive version of Griffith's Valuation online. The original page images may also be viewed. This version of the survey was first published in 2003, the first time it had been published in its entirety since the 19th century.

What images are available

Town Plans

Like the Ordnance Survey maps, the plans frequently contain annotations made by the Griffith's Valuation team and subsequently by Valuation Office personnel.

Multiple plans

For larger towns, their size may mean that several plans are needed to cover the area. Given that most plans are at the scale of 5 feet to the mile, if the town covers an area of much more than a square mile, more than one sheet will be needed.

For many places there are multiple plans, usually created at different times. The majority are undated, but as far as possible the one you retrieve first will be the earliest, which will the one first used in Griffith's Valuation. Since the plans cover a wide range of dates (though all 19th century), you will be able in many cases to see the development of towns over a period of nearly 100 years; in many cases the plans are marked up by hand to show new developments. These plans are still often used by the Valuation Office today, when they need to determine whether, for example, a particular plot of land has ever been built on, even where no trace of any building remains.

Plot boundaries

The people working on the valuation for each townland marked up the plot boundaries for every property recorded within Griffith's Valuation.

There are often multiple copies of the same map and unfortunately these have not yet been indexed to identify which one has been marked up for a particular townland. However, we estimate that in over two-thirds of the cases maps will have been marked-up. When you find the townland area on the map, you may be able to find where the actual property - maybe your ancestor's house or farm - was located. Be aware that these numbers are by no means always clear, nor are the boundaries of the townlands always easy to make out.

Multiple copies of maps

The Griffith's team used multiple copies of the relevant Ordnance Survey (OS) map since one map typically covers several townlands and several people could be working in the area covered by a map. So there will often be more than one copy of the OS map for the townland you are interested in. On average there are about two copies of each OS map and these are easily accessible when viewing the images.