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Rental records are great sources for documenting actual family history – helping researchers understand the circumstances in which their ancestors lived.  But they have a secondary, if unintended, use as census substitutes. A comprehensive account of land rental records and their uses in family history research has been published on this site as ‘Rentals as ...

Small Sources No.50. This is a list of 173 tenants on the Earl of Leitrim’s Manorhamilton estate in the period 1829-36. The original document (NLI Ms. 16,978) is in the National Library of Ireland among the extensive Leitrim Papers, which contain the records of the Clements family (Earls of Leitrim) from 1749 to 1946. Other rentals ...

Small Sources No. 40. This is a list of 137 tenants on the Earl of Leitrim’s Bohey estate in 1829. The circumstance would appear to be the appointment of a new land agent, Berry Norris, who compiled a statement of what was owed by tenants when he started in his new role. In addition to ...

Small Sources No. 39. This is a rental of the Earl of Leitrim listing tenants in the Mohill area, Co. Leitrim on 29th September 1800. Although it contains only 67 names,  the genealogical value  is significantly increased by the fact that almost all leases are ‘leases for lives’, i.e. for the duration of the lives of ...

By Tom Coughlan,  Author:       Research always seems to throw up the unexpected. Before starting to write Tracing Your Leitrim Ancestors (Flyleaf Press 2018),  I believed that Leitrim had always been the least populated county in Ireland – as it is today. However, this is not the case.  In 1841 Leitrim had 155,000 residents, making ...