The Council of the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) is pleased to announce that the 2025 recipient of the Wallace Clare Award (WCA)*** is Richard Nicholas ‘Nick’ Reddan of Canberra, Australia. Nick is a Fellow of the Society and a member of its governing Council. The award recognises the enormous amount of voluntary work Nick has done over the past three decades. His major worldwide contribution is the freely available online Registry of Deeds Index Project database. In addition, he maintains a Newspaper Extracts database, he lectures and he has written books and many journal articles.
Nick is a native of Queensland. His Reddan ancestors were from County Clare, while his mother is descended from Irish Crokers. He began seriously researching his family history in 1988. In the early 1990s he spent a few years in London and it was then that he came in contact with the IGRS. He joined in 1992. He has also devoted enormous time to the society over the years, as a Council member and as webmaster, with a particular focus on databases. Nick was elected a Fellow of the IGRS on 2006. He is also a Fellow of Family History ACT. He is the second Australian recipient of the Wallace Clare Award, following Jennifer Harrison, who received it in 2022.
His own Newspaper Extracts database currently has over 28,000 records, more than half of which were extracted by him. The remainder were donated by the late Simon de Montfort, wishing that his collection would remain available. Nick’s books include Raw History for Old Kilmallock Town (2011), while his articles have appeared in Ancestors, the Ancestral Searcher, Descent, the Genealogist’s Magazine, The Indexer, the Irish Genealogist and Kilmallock Journal.
Nick’s online Registry of Deeds Index Project database is a phenomenal achievement. The Registry of Deeds is particularly rich in Irish genealogical information for the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, though the earlier years are more relevant to prosperous, mainly Protestant families. The index project began in 2007, as Nick’s creation. He has maintained it for over eighteen years, supplying a substantial amount of entries himself. But this is a community project into which many enthusiasts have contributed information. As of 21 December 2025, there are 644,799 index entries, relating to 66,005 individual memorials of deeds. The greatest contributor, with almost 160,000 entries, was the late Roz McCutcheon, the recipient of the 2023 Wallace Clare Award. The other people who have contributed over 50,000 entries each are Ron Price, Hilary Jarvis and Shirley Walsh.
In light of all of Nick Reddan’s achievements, the IGRS has great pleasure in awarding this year’s WCA to him.
***The Wallace Clare Award is named in honour of Rev. Wallace Clare (1895-1963), a Catholic priest and keen academic who founded the IGRS in 1936. This was as a response to the great conflagration of 1922, which consumed almost the entire contents of Ireland’s Public Record Office. Fr. Clare initiated the Society's core policy of maintaining a library which 87 years later holds an invaluable collection of transcripts and abstracts compiled from documents subsequently destroyed in the fire. He was the author of the first ever book on Irish ancestral research, A Simple Guide to Irish Genealogy, published in 1937. Unsurprisingly, Fr. Clare was the first individual to be elected a Fellow of the IGRS in 1937.
