In 1937 the Irish Folklore Commission, in collaboration with the Department of Education and the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, initiated a revolutionary scheme in which schoolchildren were encouraged to collect and document folklore and local history. Over a period of eighteen months some 100,000 children in 5,000 primary schools in the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State were encouraged to collect folklore material in their home districts. The topics about which the children were instructed to research and write included local history and monuments, folktales and legends, riddles and proverbs, songs, customs and beliefs, games and pastimes, traditional work practices and crafts, etc. The children collected this material mainly from their parents and grandparents and other older members of the local community or school district. Their work was committed to copybooks which were then collected by the commission. Now known as the Schools' Manuscript Collection, the scheme resulted in more than half a million manuscript pages of valuable material. Co. Cork was in particular heavily involved in the scheme and none more so than the national schools in the Muscraí Gaeltacht. Now in their mid eighties, four former students remember vividly their time spent collecting the folklore from their grandparents, they recount the days of their youth, their hopes and dreams and how their lives finally turned out. They are shown their copybooks for the first time since 1938 with some surprising results. Cristóir Ó Tuama originally from Balleyvourney, Co. Cork remembers sitting down at night beside his grandmothers bed and painstakingly writing down her stories, prayers and proverbs. Stories that had been passed down through the generations. Crstóir's grandmother refused to talk about the famine because she had vivid memories of the collective shame and trauma that people in the locality had felt when she was a young girl. Cristóir's classmate Donal O Rio