CHAPTER 3: ONGOING AND PROPOSED ADDITIONAL RESEARCH: Documenting and thus proving my proposed theory of our Rollestons’ connection to Scotland and how exactly our Rolleston ancestors in Ulster arrived from Scotland comprises the main remaining challenge of completing our family’s paternal genealogical research. And the challenge is significant. First, many Irish records before the 1800s were destroyed in 1922 during the Irish civil war between supporters and opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. During the Battle of Dublin, the Four Courts complex was seized and occupied by Anti-Treaty forces. Before commanding officer Ernie O'Malley surrendered at 3:30 p.m. on 30 June, a large explosion ripped through the Public Records Office. The records destroyed included: census records for the whole of the 19th century, chancery records detailing British rule going back to the 14th century and grants of land by the crown, thousands of wills and title deeds, records of various chief secretaries to Ireland, and centuries of Church of Ireland parish registers. There is hope, however, a fair number of these records may be recovered through the recently completed “Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury” research project, which aims to recreate as much of these records as possible through duplicates in other archives. 173 Second, that disaster aside, records in Ireland were pretty spotty anyway before the government started to require recordkeeping in 1864. Parish registers rarely kept records before 1800, and many of them have been lost, destroyed, or are missing for other reasons. The widespread violence and instability associated with Reformation and Counterreformation across Ireland during much of the 1600s did not help matters. Scottish records before the mid-1700s rarely survive as well. Third, specific to our surname, there were both Scottish Ralstons AND English Rollestons who arrived in Ulster during the 1600s for many of the same reasons. Both experienced various changes in their spellings and misspellings in records that can make it difficult to differentiate the two. 174 In large part, inconsistent spellings were a factor of high illiteracy among the population at the time, which gave those keeping and creating official records a lot of leeway and interpretation regarding name spellings. Irish records of the time include spelling variations of both Ralston and Rolleston such as: Rawlston, Rowlston, Roleston, Rolestone, Rollestone, Rollston, Rollestone, Rolston, and Roulston. Scottish records also include spellings of Ralstoun and Raulston. There was also a separate Ralton family that eventually adopted the spelling of Ralston. 175 And while many families at least remained 173 Ronan McGreevy, “Retrieval of Irish archive lost in 1922 fire ‘astounding’, historian says,” The Irish Times, 5 Dec 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/retrieval-of-irish-archive-lost-in-1922-fire- astounding-historian-says-1.4104963 . The effort’s website is at: https://virtualtreasury.ie/ . 174 For more discussion, see: https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/ralston/about/background . 175 Bruce Ralston notes in an email that some present day Ralstons may have descended from a distinct family with a slightly different name “Ralton.” The Raltons are from a distinctly separate geographical 74