Mr. McHugh’s class undertake massive digital project

Over the past number of weeks, Mr. McHugh’s 6th class (in conjunction with one of our parents from the Board of Management) have been working on a massive historical project. Our school has a storied history and Mr. Ryan managed to locate one of our oldest roll books in the school dating back to the 1880’s. The idea for the project was borne.

Since the beginning of May, Mr. McHugh and his 6th class have worked tirelessly to bring this project to fruition. It involved meetings between Mr McHugh and our very generous parent, discussing the project and how we could roll it out, Mr. McHugh taking images of each page (100’s of pages) and uploading the images onto a laptop, further consultation with our parent (who was responsible for software development and integration) and a discussion with the pupils.

Using our newly purchased Chromebooks, our pupils were amazing as they transcribed text (that was difficult to decipher and contained some occupations that no longer exist) onto Microsoft Excel- a task that took many hours of careful work and concentration- even Mr. Ryan managed to pop in to engage in such a historic project. 

The efforts of Mr. McHugh, his 6th class students and our parent are now visible on the homepage of the website- www.historyproject.ie. If you click on the link, you will find over 2000 individual records of girls who attended St. Peter’s NS- am amazing piece of history in digital form. One past pupil of St. Peter’s includes Mabel Joyce (1893-1911). Mabel was author James Joyce's little sister. James Joyce (arguably one of Irish finest writers) lived on St. Peter’s Road for a short period of time at the beginning of the 20th century.

A huge thanks to Mr. McHugh, his 6th class and our Board of Management parent for their excellent collaboration on what was a once in a generation opportunity.