The Archive
The Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessy Archive (c. 1860-1970)
The O’Shaughnessy archive was donated to the NUI Galway Library by the O’Shaughnessy family in 2016.
Its contents include material that document his time in private practice, primarily engineering drawings, related reports and correspondence from the planning and execution of survey work in California, and irrigation design and construction projects in Hawaii. The archive also includes his memoirs, four in total. Engineering Experiences: From Honolulu to Hetch Hetchy, Reminiscences of Hawaii, (February 1920), My Trip Abroad (July-October 1925), and Hetch Hetchy: Its Origin and History (1934); the latter being the only memoir from the collection that has been published to date.
The archive includes a large collection of photographs from his projects and his personal life. There are also many photographs of the fascinating O’Shaughnessy daughters that document their lives after their father’s death, up until the 1960s.
Our Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessy archive has been digitised in its entirety and is available in our Digital Repository.
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley also holds a major O’Shaughnessy archive with substantial primary source material relating to his time as City Engineer. Read more information on the archive held by The Bancroft Library.
