The tale that Elizabeth Danvers told in August 1645 remains tantalizingly unfinished. After giving her account of close calls, survival, and eventual poverty in Dublin, she simply disappears, like the majority of other deponents. Historiographically, the survivors of 1641 also have tended to disappear. A wealth of scholarship over the past two decades has focused on the history of the 1641 rebellion and has allowed the recovery of this history from crude sectarian interpretations and misuses. However, the problem of survivors' experiences has merited significantly less attention than violence, the causes of the rebellion, and the impact of the rising on Anglo-Irish relations in the seventeenth century. The relative inattention to survival and the experience of victims has created a significant gap in our understanding of both the social and cultural history of the 1641 rising.

This chapter attempts to address this silence by reconstructing the experiences of those who survived the rising. Integral to this is an understanding of the massive archive of survivor testimony collectively known as the 1641 depositions at Trinity College Dublin. Historians have found a number of different ways to use the depositions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these documents provided fodder for contentious and often sectarian-tinged debates about the extent of violence during the war. More productively, in the past several decades, important works have used the depositions to reconstruct a better sense of the chronology and regional impacts of the rising.