Ireland: Lawrence Collection of photographs, 1870 - 1910

Ancestry have added a database of more than 21,000 photographs from Ireland indexed so they can be searched by subject, location, and county.

This snippet from one of the images in the collection, the Roman Catholic church at Kilkeel, County Down, shows the quality to be expected in these early photographs.

According to Ancestry "The Lawrence Collection, one of the most significant early photographic collections documenting Ireland, consists of some 40,000 glass-plate negatives taken between 1870 and 1914. Chief photographer Robert French traveled to every county in Ireland taking pictures, and many of the photos were reproduced on postcards and in albums during the late 19th and early 20th century.
The collection is named for William Lawrence, who opened a photography studio in Dublin in 1865 and hired French as one of his photographers. The plates are now housed in the National Library of Ireland."

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