The Archives Service is undertaking a programme of activities aimed at students and education providers in County Donegal.
The aim of this programme is to increase awareness of the importance of local archives and of the potential use of the extensive collection of documents preserved by the County Archives in Lifford to students and teachers.
Primary School Pack
As part of the programme, in 2006, the Service launched its Schools Facsimile Pack, an innovative primary school history curriculum project supported by the Heritage Council and the Donegal Education Centre.
The aim of this project is to increase awareness of local archives and local history by introducing archival material to children at a young age, in a manner that causes no threat to the preservation of the documents.
The packs are potentially a very versatile teaching aid for use in history, geography, civics or social studies classes and are easily manipulated in the classroom.
Archival material demonstrates the nature of evidence, introducing the concept of primary and secondary sources and can also help develop a broad range of investigative and interpretive skills in students.
Documents in the pack are arranged under topics taken straight from the primary school curriculum and include: Homes and My Locality, Schools and Life in the Nineteenth Century.
There are packs for four different regions in the county, with accompanying facsimiles of documents from the Archives relating to the regions. Documents include past and present day photographs of towns, railway notices and photographs of trains and other means of transport, plans of labourers’ cottages, school records, extracts from workhouse registers, and fisheries’ posters.
The Primary School Pack, or extracts from the pack, can now be downloaded from here in Adobe Acrobat format.
Flight of the Earls 
To mark the 400th anniversary of the Flight of the Earls, with the financial support of the International Fund for Ireland, the Archives Service has produced a Document Study Pack for second level schools in Counties Donegal, Tyrone and Derry. The pack contains a selection of facsimiles of 16th and 17th century documents covering the events leading up to the Flight of the Earls of Tyrone and Tír Chonaill and the subsequent Plantation of Ulster. It also contains an introductory background to the history of the Flight, as well as worksheets.
Copies of the pack are available on request to schools throughout the country.
Guide to the Archives for Teachers and Students
The Archives Service has also produced a Guide to the archival collections aimed at teachers and students. The Guide includes details of the major collections held by the County Archives as well as notes for teachers on how they might be utilized for the teaching of local history. The Guide is available in Irish and English. Click here to download this Teacher Guide in PDF format.
In-Service Training
Primary teachers visited the County Archives to view documents and photographs and were given information on the history of the collections as part of training courses for teachers during the summers of 2005, 2006 and 2007.
