Researcher (history, genealogy, provenance, title and probate research), Cataloguing and Digitisation Expert
Employment
2017-present: Acting Curator, Heritage Services, Buildings & Estates Office, University College Cork. I have completed the inventory of the UCC Curatorial Collections. All details together with a photograph of each object have now been recorded into a Microsoft Access database that I designed. I researched archival sources to find historical museum catalogues from the era of Queen’s College Cork: information from these has been included in individual object records. Further information relating to provenance (ownership history) of objects is also being researched and added to the records. This information adds value to each record of an object and enables the uncovering of the significance of objects. In addition to keeping track of objects in the UCC Curatorial Collections that are located in various places on campus, I am also writing professional policies and procedures relating to the care of the collections.
2003-present: Freelance Researcher, Cataloguer and IT. This has been a very productive period in which I have catalogued libraries and archives, created several databases for clients including Cork City Council, University College Cork, and The Hunt Museum. I have also researched family trees, focussing particularly, but not only, on Cork families. I have developed an expertise in title (legal) research and probate genealogy, this means researching the legal title of property in Ireland which usually involves doing genealogical research also as property often passes through a family. Currently I am researching and writing about how the land purchase system presided over by the Irish Land Commission functioned.
A particularly fascinating area of work is provenance (ownership history) research. This work involves using sale catalogues, archival material and other sources to track the ownership history of works of art or artefacts. I have researched the background to a collection of ancient objects now located in an Irish University. With twenty years’ expertise in researching Cork history I have gathered much material about items. One of these that I came across led to me contributing information to provenance information about an oil painting (The Continence of Scipio by Sebastiano Ricci) at the Art Institute of Chicago.
As part of reporting I present to boards of directors or other influencers. I have also lectured to local historical societies including the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society, the Blarney & District Historical Society, and the Cork Genealogical Society. I also lecture students on the Diploma in Genealogy course for the Centre for Adult Education, UCC.
2003 Faculty Research Support Officer at the Faculty of Arts, UCC. My remit from the Dean, Prof. Peter C. Woodman, was to research and compile reports on funding opportunities, including grant-making trusts, and charities which give funding for research to staff and graduate students. This resulted in three reports: ‘Funding in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Research’ (248pp), ‘Funding in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Funding for Students’ (132pp) and ‘Internships’ (21pp).
1999-2002 Project Manager, Centre for Neo-Latin Studies and later Documents of Ireland project (funded under PRTLI). I created the first website for the Department of Ancient Classics; included in this was the Renaissance Latin Texts of Ireland pages where I published online bibliographies for David Rothe (1573-1650), James Ussher (1581-1656), Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618); and Peter Lombard (1554-1625) – this particular bibliography has been described by Thomas F. Mayer as “One of the most thorough treatments of the sources for Lombard’s life is by Margaret Lantry …” [note 463] in his monograph The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and its Laws in the Age of Galileo (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). During this period I wrote two articles (Richard Stanihurst and James Ussher) for the Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500-1960 (general editor Robert B. Todd) published by Thoemmes Continuum in 2004, and also an article ‘Cork Neo-Latin Writers’ in the 2003 Journal of the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society (editor Dr Cornelius G. Buttimer).
1997-1998 Project Manager, Corpus of Electronic Texts Project, University College Cork. During my time as manager more than 1 million words were put up online.
1996-1997 Managing Editor, Cork University/Royal Irish Academy project, RIA, Dublin. This innovative project provided digital texts in SGML format online.
1990-1996 Senior Research Associate, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge: I was Edition Manager of the Royal Historical Society British Bibliographies Project (General Editor Prof. John S. Morrill). My responsibility was to manage and direct the creation of the bibliographical database (finally coming to 250,000 records) for publication on CD-ROM by the RHistS in 1998. During this project we used the internet (remember Gopher?) and email in the days just before the World Wide Web. I am also the Section Editor for the bibliography of Roman Britain (Volume Editor, Ian Wood). During this time I was also a contributor to TOCS-IN (Table of Contents of Interest to Classicists) (University of Toronto). With British Council funding I lectured about the bibliometric analysis of the project database at the International Association for History & Computing at Montreal, Canada, in 1995. In 1996 I contributed the digital text of Decimus Magnus Ausonius’ ‘Mosella’ (ed. Karl Schenkl) to the Oxford Text Archive [ref. U-1949-A] (this 483 line poem was the subject of my research Master’s thesis).
For more details, read more about
Research Projects
Genealogy Projects
Museum-related Projects
Archives and Library-related Projects
Digital Projects
Education
Graduate of University College Cork (BA, HDE, Research MA) and University of Sheffield (MA in Librarianship). Member of the Chartered Institute of Information Scientists (MCLIP) and the Library Association of Ireland.
Doctoral student from October 2017 in School of History, UCC. I was awarded a three-year College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Excellence Scholarship at University College Cork in 2017.
Voluntary
As part of my community work I have acted over several years as Chair of Cork County Council Heritage Forum. I am a former member of the Supervisors Committee of a Cork Credit Union.
For seventeen years I was member of the Council of the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society; during this time I held several roles including Company Secretary, Editor of the Journal (7 volumes), first Webmaster (2000-2019) (corkhist.ie) and Vice-President. I digitised the Journal (1892-2007) and its Index and made these available online.
In 2016 I was fortunate to be asked to write a history of the South Chapel (St Finbarr’s South), Dunbar Street, Cork city. This church was built in 1766 and is the oldest functioning Roman Catholic church in the city. This architectural history publications includes over fifty colour illustrations, is fully referenced and includes a select bibliography. A History of St Finbarr’s Church, Cork 1766-2016, first edition (September 2016), is now sold out. A revised first edition was published in October 2016 (ISBN 9780995609006) and is now available for sale online at Amazon UK, “Look inside” at Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, Amazon.ca. I am currently preparing a second edition for publication.
See list of my other publications at Academia, Google Scholar and 
ORCID.