A digitised and transcribed diary written by the mother of an Irish soldier missing in action during the Great War was launched today by Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan.
Entitled ‘A Family at War: Mary Martin’s Diary, 1 January-25 May 1916′, the project is an online resource developed and produced by students on Trinity College Dublin’s M Phil in Digital Humanities and Culture, and the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD in UCC, using a manuscript treasure from the collections of the National Library of Ireland. This innovative approach to understanding our cultural heritage will be made freely available online to the public.
Mary Martin, a widow and mother of 12 children, living in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown, began a diary shortly after she received official word that her son Charlie, a soldier with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was missing in action on the Salonika front. As she wrote in her first entry on New Year’s Day 1916 and finished on 25 May that year, shortly before official word came that Charlie had been killed.
In another twist to this family’s story, Charlie’s sister, Mary Martin, was a nurse on the same front where Charlie went missing. Letters home to her mother testify to her searching for her brother amongst the wounded. She later went on to found the order of the Medical Missionaries of Mary.
The project was produced as part of a Digital Scholarly Editing module taught by Prof Susan Schreibman of the School of English, and the director of the MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture.
"It provides a model of how we can bring alive historical treasures too infrequently seen by the public," Prof Schreibman said. "This project is a perfect example of a melding of interdisciplinary skills; how students with a humanities background can utilise their expertise while learning valuable state-of-the-art high-tech skills in the creation of online resources for cultural heritage."
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