In the autumn of 1937, something extraordinary happened in Irish classrooms. Teachers handed their pupils a notebook and an unusual task: go home and ask your grandparents everything they know. What came back would become one of the greatest acts of cultural preservation in modern history.
A Country Racing Against Time
By the 1930s, Ireland’s oldest generation carried knowledge that existed nowhere else in the world.
They knew which plants cured a fever and which ones caused it. They remembered the prayers said over a new-born calf, the words used to keep misfortune from a threshold, and the stories that explained why certain fields were never ploughed after dark.
Most of this knowledge had never been written down. It lived only in memory — in people born in the 1850s and 1860s, who had grown up in a world still shaped by centuries of unbroken rural tradition.
Ireland’s newly founded state understood what was at stake. When those people died, those worlds would vanish with them.
The Scheme That Changed Everything
The Irish Folklore Commission, led by scholar Séamus Ó Duilearga, designed something bold: a nationwide collection project using children as its collectors.
They trained five thousand national school teachers across the twenty-six counties and gave them a structured questionnaire covering dozens of topics — cures, customs, placename lore, weather signs, ghost stories, and more. Children between the ages of eleven and fourteen were asked to go home and write down whatever their oldest relatives could tell them.
No professional folklorist could have covered the ground. There were too few of them and too many farms, islands, and mountain parishes to reach. But children were already in those homes every evening. They just needed to be told to listen.
What the Children Brought Back
The notebooks came back filled with a vanishing world.
Cures for toothache and whooping cough. The names of every field on a family’s land — names that went back centuries and existed in no other record. Beliefs about the first visitor to cross a threshold on New Year’s morning. The right words to say when passing a holy well. Rules for behaviour during a thunderstorm.
Ireland has over 60,000 named townlands, many with histories stretching back to the Early Christian period. Hundreds of those local names and the stories behind them were recorded for the first time in these children’s notebooks.
By the time the project closed in 1939, children from every county had contributed — from the Aran Islands to the Glens of Antrim, from West Kerry to the flat midlands of Laois and Offaly. Over half a million manuscript pages had been collected and preserved.
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The Grandparents Nobody Had Listened To
What made the project remarkable was who the children were interviewing.
These grandparents had not been recognised as experts or authorities. They were farmers, fisherwomen, labourers — ordinary people living ordinary rural lives. But in their memories they carried an unbroken thread back through generations of Irish life that no library held.
They remembered the strict customs around naming children, the cures for ailments the doctor never reached, the seasonal rituals that governed planting and harvesting. They knew which plants, which days, and which words carried weight.
Through their grandchildren’s copybooks, they became the most thoroughly documented generation of rural Irish people in recorded history.
A Window That Is Still Open
Today, the Schools’ Folklore Collection is freely available online through Dúchas.ie.
You can search by county, by school, or by topic. You can read the careful handwriting of eleven-year-olds from Donegal and Galway, transcribing the words of people born before the railways reached their parishes. You can find prayers, superstitions, stories, and customs that were never otherwise recorded anywhere in the world.
If you have Irish roots, searching the Dúchas archive for a school near your family’s county can feel like opening a door into a vanished world. Names, phrases, and beliefs that your own family may have carried without ever knowing where they came from.
If you are planning a trip to Ireland and want to understand the place beyond its postcard landscape, the archive is one of the most extraordinary starting points available. Combine it with your Ireland travel plans and you may find yourself searching for the school — and the townland — where your story began.
The children of 1937 did not know they were making history. They thought they were doing homework. But they preserved something that would otherwise have been lost for ever — the ordinary, extraordinary knowledge of the people who came before them.
Somewhere in those notebooks is a grandmother from Sligo, a grandfather from Clare, a great-aunt from the mountains of Kerry, still speaking to us now. All because a teacher sent a child home with a notebook and told them to listen.
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