RT Generic T1 Questionnaire: Irish Famine (1845-1852) A1 National Folklore Collection A1 Irish Folklore Commission A1 Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) NO Scope and Content: A questionnaire entitled “The Great Famine of 1845-1852” was circulated in 1945 by the Irish Folklore Commission among its full- and part-time collectors, and its extensive network of correspondents. This was in response to a request from a group of historians appointed by the Government to produce a major study of the Famine to mark the hundredth anniversary of its outbreak. Some 4,650 hand-written pages of information were recorded by Commission staff and correspondents from oral sources in all four provinces, and these were delivered in the same year to the expert group of historians for analysis. The first analysis of this material, by Roger J. McHugh, was published in 1956. Seamus Ó Duilearga, the Commission’s Honorary Director, is credited by the editors of The Great Famine, R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (in which McHugh’s analysis appears), with suggesting to them the project of compiling a history of the Great Famine. This valuable oral source has been extensively used by historians and researchers in other disciplines since then [cf. Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond, The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Cathal Poirtéir, Famine Echoes (Gill and Macmillan, 1995), the latter in which many questionnaire replies are featured, including translations of Irish-language material]. AN uri:info:fedora/ivrla:20162 UL http://hdl.handle.net/:10151/EAD_0000028_IF LK //digital.ucd.ie/?getObject=ivrla:20162 SL UCD Library, University College Dublin LL Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland