FOR THE people of South Armagh – or anywhere else for that matter – a treasure trove of over 100 newly-digitized photographs taken by Michael J. Murphy between 1950 and 1970 in his home area of ??south Armagh were launched last month on the website dúchas.ie.
Murphy was a full-time collector with the Irish Folklore Commission from 1949 until his retirement in 1983.
Unlike some of the other collectors, he had a camera and took photographs of the storytellers and the world in which they lived and is an invaluable resource.
The Liverpool-born Murphy collected around 1,300 negatives during his fieldwork throughout Ulster and Co. Louth.
Other material already available on dúchas.ie includes c.26,000 folklore items from the Main Collection of Manuscripts, collected by collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission since 1935.
New material from this collection is added to the site on a quarterly basis.
There is also the Schools Collection, material from each of the 26 counties that participated in the Schools Scheme in 1937–39.
Meitheal Dúchas.ie was launched in Spring 2015, a transcription project which is one of the most successful crowdsourcing projects of its kind in the world.
To date, over 330,000 pages have been voluntarily transcribed by the members of the Working Group.
Dúchas.ie is of interest to both Irish people and the diaspora. Large numbers of users are located in Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, among many other countries.
Dúchas.ie is a great resource for those interested in folklore, local history, archeology, genealogy, linguistics and many other areas of research.
The collection can be searched by places, by people and by topics, and contains content from almost every parish in the country.
Dúchas.ie is the result of a partnership established in 2012 between the National Folklore Collection at UCD, the UCD Digital Library, and Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, an Irish-medium teaching and research unit at DCU.
The project aims to digitize and make available the entire collection of the National Folklore Collection
These photographs can be found at www.duchas.ie/en/ppl/cbeg/79506041 where a leaflet on Michael J. Murphy has also been compiled.
