1916 in County Waterford Museum and Archives

1916 in County Waterford Museum and Archives...

The important role played by museums and archives in making the history and heritage of County Waterford available to all is well represented in this year's ninetieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

The Waterford County Archive Service holds the collection of minute books of the County Council and has mounted an exhibition of the relevant pages referring to Easter 1916 in the Branch Library in Dungarvan. These well illustrate the country-wide change of heart that followed the Rising and the executions of the leaders.

The Waterford County Museum's website records a local response to the 1916 Rising in the online memoir of George Lennon: Strange as it may seem, P.C. (O'Mahony) and I captured a post office on Easter Monday night in 1916. It was an easy capture. P.C. was the postal night clerk and he immediately answered my excited knock on the door. A telegraph instrument was clack-clacking and P.C. translated the messages. One telegraph message indicated that a train of munitions for the British troops was passing through our town at 2 a.m. P.C. said it should be wrecked. But how? He could not leave his post and we were the only two Volunteers in the county. He let me out the back door of the post office. Grasping my .32 revolver I rushed off into the night to seek assistance. The rain was coming down in torrents.  Text reproduced by kind permission of Ivan Lennon and of the Waterford County Museum Society.  The full memoir is at:

Link: http://www.waterfordcountymuseum.org/exhibit/web/Display/article/116/3/?lang=en

Another part of the Museum's website:

Link: http://www.waterfordcountyimages.org/exhibit/web

This site holds two portraits of George Lennon among the 2,369 images to which it gives full free public access. This website won the Best Small Museum Website 2006 award at this year's international conference on Museums on the Web, held at Albuquerque, New Mexico last month.