Tracing Ireland’s Land History: The Digitisation of the Keane Index

Today, these records are held by the Records Branch of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, but they remain inaccessible to researchers.

To bridge this gap, the Irish Land Commission Index Cards, known as the Keane Index,  were created between 1969 and 1970 through a collaboration between the Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC), the National Library of Ireland (NLI), and the Land Commission, with support from the Public Records Office of Ireland (now the National Archives) and the Registry of Deeds. Dr. Edward Keane, assigned by the Department of Education from the NLI to the Land Commission in March 1969, worked closely with the IMC to design the structure and scope of this ambitious indexing project.

Keane examined 8,447 boxes of papers relating to 9,343 estates and produced 36,000 index cards along with 35 bound volumes, each approximately 400 pages long. These volumes cover records accumulated under the Land Acts from 1891 to 1909. Fully cross-referenced, the index allows researchers to search by county, estate, or individual name. Each entry links to a corresponding “box number” in the Land Commission files. The physical index is available for consultation in the NLI’s Manuscripts Reading Room.

In 2023, the IMC approached the NLI with a proposal to digitise the Keane Index and create an online finding aid for the Land Commission records. Cataloguing and digitisation began in 2024, and selected images are now accessible through our online catalogue.

In the continued absence of public access to the original Land Commission files, the Keane Index remains an indispensable resource for historians, genealogists, and anyone researching Ireland’s land and social history.