The Year Ireland Sent 100,000 Schoolchildren to Interview Their Grandparents

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In 1937, Ireland’s National Folklore Commission did something that had never been done before — and probably never will be again. It handed a notebook to every schoolchild in the country and sent them home with a single instruction: ask your grandparents what they remember.

What came back changed Irish culture for ever.

The Project That Nobody Expected to Work

The idea came from Séamus Ó Duilearga, a folklore scholar who understood that Ireland’s oldest oral traditions were dying out. The people who remembered pre-Famine customs, herbal cures, fairy beliefs, and townland legends were in their eighties. In ten years, most would be gone.

His solution was radical. Instead of sending professional folklorists into every parish — an impossible task — he would use the school system itself. One hundred thousand children. Every county. Every townland.

He called it Scéim Bailiúcháin na Scol. The Schools’ Collection.

What the Children Found

Between 1937 and 1938, Irish children recorded over 500,000 pages of material. They wrote in Irish and in English, sometimes in careful copperplate, sometimes in scrawled pencil.

They asked about the meaning of place names. They recorded cures for toothache and the rituals for entering a fairy fort. They wrote down songs their great-grandmothers sang, the stories told at wakes, the weather sayings and the prayers said before journeys.

One child in County Clare wrote down a cure for a black eye involving a wedding ring and a piece of bread. Another in Donegal described how no farmer would plant potatoes on a Friday. A girl in Mayo recorded her grandfather’s version of a legend that had been told in that parish for four hundred years.

None of this existed in any archive anywhere. It lived only in living memory.

Why Grandparents Were the Key

Children were specifically asked to speak to the eldest people they knew — grandparents, great-aunts, old neighbours. These were people born before the Land Acts, before the railway reached most of the country, before electricity came to rural Ireland.

They remembered a world without hospitals, where the local herbalist was the only medicine for miles. They remembered wake games, crossroads dances, and the names of fields that no map had ever recorded.

By going through children, the commission reached into households that no outsider could have entered. These were private people, suspicious of strangers. But when a grandson sat down at the kitchen table with a copybook, they talked.

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What the Collection Tells Us Today

The entire archive — over 740,000 pages including teacher notebooks and supplementary material — has been digitised and placed online at duchas.ie. Anyone in the world can search it, free of charge.

You can type in the name of almost any Irish townland and find what was recorded there in 1937. A person in Boston can read a description of a cattle cure that a child’s grandfather gave in the exact parish their great-great-grandmother left during the Famine.

For anyone tracing Irish family roots, it is one of the most remarkable resources in existence — specific, human, and full of the kind of detail no official record ever captures.

How to Search the Archive

Go to duchas.ie and select “The Schools’ Collection.” Search by county, by townland, or by theme — weather lore, fairy beliefs, games and pastimes. You will find children’s handwriting from 1937, the words their grandparents used, the stories they were told to keep safe.

If your family comes from Ireland, the townland your ancestors lived in almost certainly appears in the archive. If you are planning a visit, the 7-day Irish ancestry itinerary pairs beautifully with a duchas.ie search — you can arrive knowing exactly what stories were told in the fields you are walking through.

A Homework Assignment That Changed Everything

Scholars consider the Schools’ Collection one of the largest folklore archives ever assembled anywhere in the world. More material was gathered in those eighteen months than professional folklorists could have collected in a century.

The children who did the collecting are in their nineties now, or gone. They had no idea what they were preserving. They were just doing their homework.

But what they gathered — the cures, the curses, the stories, the songs, the superstitions — is still there. Sitting on a screen, waiting for anyone who cares to look.

Ireland is a country where the old ways run close to the surface. You feel it at a crossroads, at a holy well, in the particular silence of a bog road at dusk. The Schools’ Collection is evidence that even at its most modern, Ireland understood what it stood to lose — and asked its youngest people to go and find out before it disappeared.

The notebook a child filled in a Kerry kitchen in 1937 might contain the name of the fairy tree in the field behind your ancestors’ house. Start planning your trip to Ireland, and when you arrive, you may find more than scenery. You may find the story that has been waiting for you all along.

Secure Your Dream Irish Experience Before It’s Gone!

Planning a trip to Ireland? Don’t let sold-out tours or packed attractions spoil your journey. Iconic experiences like visiting the Cliffs of Moher, exploring the Rock of Cashel, or enjoying a guided walk through Ireland’s ancient past often sell out quickly—especially during peak travel seasons.

Booking in advance guarantees your place and ensures you can fully immerse yourself in the rich culture and breathtaking scenery without stress or disappointment. You’ll also free up time to explore Ireland’s hidden gems and savour those authentic moments that make your trip truly special.

Make the most of your journey—start planning today and secure those must-do experiences before they’re gone!

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