Irish radicals added to the Chartist Ancestors Databank

I have added 143 new names to the Chartist Ancestors Databank, taking the total number of those included to 14,523.

This latest batch includes a significant number of Chartists of Irish origin, and is made up of three groups.

• 23 signatories to the Barnsley Manifesto, published by the Yorkshire town’s radicals in June 1843 just as the final draft of the People’s Charter itself was being finalised elsewhere;
• 108 signatories to an 1841 address by Barnsley’s Irish Catholic Chartists (a significant if not majority part of the Chartist body in the town) to Patrick Ryan, a pro-Chartist Catholic priest who had been a friend to Barnsley’s Chartists when he was parish priest there, and now on his return to Ireland faced attack by Daniel O’Connell and his supporters; and
• The 12 officers of the largely Dublin-based Irish Universal Suffrage Association, their names extracted from the reports of a police spy which are now in the National Archives.

Report of a police spy, now held in The National Archives (CO 904/8)

The Chartist Ancestors Databank pulls together lists of the names of Chartists compiled from a variety of sources, including the records of the Chartist Land Company, conference delegates, and donors to Chartist causes. It is far from a complete list of Chartist supporters, but unfortunately such a thing does not exist – and the petitions of the 1830s and 1840s that might have been such a valuable source for historians of all sorts did not survive the nineteenth century.

• Discover the Chartist Ancestors Databank. 
• Read more about the Irish Universal Suffrage Association and the Seven Points of the People’s Charter. 
• Read more about Peter Hoey and the Barnsley Chartists.