Griffith's Valuation was a boundary and land valuation survey of

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

completed in 1868.

Griffith's background

Richard John Griffith Sir Richard John Griffith Bt. FRS FRSE FGS LLD (20 September 1784 – 22 September 1878), was an Irish geologist, mining engineer and chairman of the Board of Works of Ireland, who completed the first complete geological map of Ireland and was ...

started to value land in

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, where he spent two years in 1806-1807 valuing terrain through the examination of its soils. He used 'the Scotch system of valuation' and it was a modified version of this that he introduced into Ireland when he assumed the position of Commissioner of Valuation.

Tasks in Ireland

In 1825 Griffith was appointed by the British Government to carry out a boundary survey of Ireland. He was to mark the boundaries of every

county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesChambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

barony Barony may refer to: * Barony, the peerage, office of, or territory held by a baron * Barony, the title and land held in fealty by a feudal baron * Barony (county division), a type of administrative or geographical division in parts of the British ...

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority ...

and

townland A townland ( ga, baile fearainn; Ulster-Scots: ''toonlann'') is a small geographical division of land, historically and currently used in Ireland and in the Western Isles in Scotland, typically covering . The townland system is of Gaelic origi ...

in preparation for the first

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. He completed the boundary work in 1844. He was also called upon to assist in the preparation of a Parliamentary bill to provide for the general valuation of Ireland. This Act was passed in 1826, and he was appointed Commissioner of Valuation in 1827, but did not start work until 1830 when the new 6" maps, became available from the

and which he was required to use as provided for by statute. He served as Commissioner until 1868, when he was succeeded by Sir John Ball Greene CB, who took charge of the ongoing revisions of the valuation on an annual basis. Griffith also served as Chairman of the Board of Works. He conducted two major valuation surveys. First was the townland valuation, which was completed in the 1840s and which took the townland as the geographical unit of valuation. The second and more extensive, was the tenement survey which valued individual property separately for the first time and which also valued all buildings in the townland for the first time, whereas, previously only the larger houses, principally those of the gentry had been valued in the first valuation. The tenement valuations of

County Dublin "Action to match our speech" , image_map = Island_of_Ireland_location_map_Dublin.svg , map_alt = map showing County Dublin as a small area of darker green on the east coast within the lighter green background of ...

were the first to be published on 5 May 1853 and the last were the valuations of

County Armagh County Armagh (, named after its county town, Armagh) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. Adjoined to the southern shore of Lough Neagh, the county covers an area of and ha ...

on 1 June 1865.

Contemporary use of and dates of valuation

The valuation is a vital document in genealogical research, since in the absence of census records in Ireland before 1901 the valuation records in many ways can act as a substitute. It is helpful in this to know the precise dates when the individual county components of the survey were completed, as follows:

References

External links

Search ''Griffith's Valuation''
on Ask about Ireland website
Is There More in Griffith's Valuation Than Just Names?
{{Irish genealogy 1868 in Ireland Geographic history of Ireland