Artificial Intelligence Used For Macardles Brewery Project
Dundalk, Co. Louth, Ireland — The Macardles Historical Society has begun using artificial intelligence to work through one of the most stubborn problems in local archive work: reading, and making searchable, thousands of names written in dense nineteenth-century cursive handwriting.
The Society’s online archive at www.macardles.ie already holds photographed pages from the surviving business records of Macardle Moore & Co. Ltd., the Dundalk brewery that traded from 1863 to 2001. The new phase of the project uses AI to go page by page through these ledgers, audit books and share registers, transcribing every legible name — however faint, abbreviated or badly formed the handwriting — and turning it into a searchable tag attached to the exact page it appears on.
The scale involved would be difficult to tackle by hand. Close to 4,000 individual name-tags have been applied to the archive so far, drawn from customer ledgers, “Sundry Balances” account books and share registers spanning decades of the brewery’s history, with more documents still to be processed.
A trading map of the border counties
One of the more striking things to emerge from the work so far is just how far the brewery’s trade reached. The customer ledgers list accounts not just around Dundalk, but across Newry, Armagh, Monaghan, Ballybay, Cootehill, Clones and Rosslea, and as far afield as Belfast, Lurgan, Enniskillen and Portadown. Alongside the publicans and merchants are a number of military customers — canteen committees for regiments including the 19th Hussars and the Scots Greys, and Coast Guard stations — a reminder that Macardle Moore supplied army and navy garrisons as well as the “tied houses” it was famous for locally.
Who keeps showing up
Running the names through analysis also throws up the brewery’s most common customers and correspondents by surname. Duffy, Byrne, Murphy, Donnelly and Kelly are the five most frequently recurring surnames across the ledgers transcribed to date, followed closely by Smith/Smyth, Rice, Brennan, Callan and Reilly — a snapshot of the family names that dominated trade and commerce across Louth, Armagh and south Ulster in the period.
Still missing: the founders’ own signatures
One thing the project has conspicuously not turned up, despite the volume of material now searched, is an actual signature of either founder — Edward Henry Macardle or Andrew Thomas Moore, who formed the partnership behind Macardle Moore & Co. in 1863. Both names appear regularly in the ledgers as capital-account headers and in profit-split entries written by clerks, but no autograph signature of either man has yet surfaced in the material reviewed.
“It’s the one thing we haven’t found, and we’ve now been through an enormous amount of paper,” said Jason McGee, Chair and PRO of the Macardles Historical Society. “Macardle and Moore’s names are everywhere in these books, but always in someone else’s handwriting. If anyone out there has a document, letter or share certificate bearing either man’s actual signature, we would love to hear from them.”
Members of the public with family documents, photographs or connections to the brewery are invited to get in touch with the Society or search for yourself via https://www.macardles.ie/archive
