Kildare County Council’s County Archives service has made nearly 18,000 pages of some of its records relating to the Poor Law Unions of Athy and Naas available via its Online Archives service including Naas Poor Law Union Minute books and Athy Poor Law Union Indoor Relief registers. These sources are an invaluable source for historians and family history researchers.
It would make your blood run cold to hear the tales of woe and misery that are told to me in the confessional; that the hardships the poor bear are beyond endurance.
Fr. Brennan, parish priest, Rathangan, evidence given in the First report of the commissioners for inquiring into the condition of the poor in Ireland (1835).
County Kildare was served by five Poor Law Unions (PLUs), with workhouses at Naas, Athy and Celbridge, in addition to workhouses in Edenderry, Co. Offaly, and Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, which covered some parts of the county. The Poor Law Unions were set up by ‘An Act for the more Effectual Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland, 1838’, which extended the English poor law system to Ireland. Naas Workhouse opened its doors to receive paupers on 4 August 1841, admitting 5 men, 1 woman and 1 child. By the following week 71 more people were in the workhouse and numbers rose steadily thereafter. The Athy Workhouse admitted its first paupers on 9 January 1844, housing 297 people by November. Celbridge Workhouse, which opened in June 1841, was the smallest of the three in the county. There is a very limited number of surviving records for Celbridge Poor Law Union and none from the nineteenth century.
The Naas Poor Law Union Minute books now online cover the pre-Famine, Famine, and post-Famine era, from April 1839 to June 1858. They provide an account of the minutes of the weekly meetings of the Naas Board of Guardians including details of how the workhouse was run, weekly statistical information on the state of the workhouse, how many men, women and children were entered, left, or died, as well as details of food, medicines, and other supplies. During the years of the famine there are details of outdoor relief, fever hospitals and temporary workhouses.
Seventeen Athy Indoor Relief registers and an index register covering the years September 1878 to July 1918 are also now available online, containing thousands of names. These Indoor Admission and Discharge registers include information recorded under headings which include Number, Name of Pauper, Sex, Age, Marital Status, Child of/Orphan/Deserted, Trade, Religious Denomination, Disabled and Nature of disability, Name of Spouse, Number of Children, Observations on condition of pauper upon admission, Electoral Division/Townland, Date admitted or when born in the workhouse, and Date of death or discharge. Each volume contains an alphabetical index. It should be noted that there are pages missing from some of the volumes and some are in poor condition.
The records relating to the Poor Law Unions of Athy and Naas are available via the Online Archives service of Kildare County Council.