Francis Joseph Bigger

His collected library, now distributed across several public institutions, comprised more than 18,000 books, journals, letters, photographs, sketches, maps, and other materials.

He was a prolific sponsor and promoter of Gaelic culture, authored many works of his own, founded (or co-founded) several institutions, and revived and edited the Ulster Journal of Archaeology.

[9] Writer Jonathan Bell characterized these as the plans of an "eccentric antiquarian", as they deliberately excluded sinks from the design, Bigger claiming that "washing up is usually done in a bucket".

[10] Regular visitors to his home in Belfast, Ardrigh House number 737b on Antrim Road, were Douglas Hyde, Roger Casement, and Francis McPeake.

[2][7] There is a long list of such visitors most of them Republicans and early separatists, known as the "Ardrigh coterie", including Stephen Gwynn, Padraic Colum, Anna Johnston, and Alice Milligan,[11][12][13] and Captain Jack White,[14] who with Casement in 1913 addressed a unique Protestant Home Rule meeting in Ballymoney.

[17] Bigger was the patron, and first president, of the Ulster Literary Theatre that was founded by in 1902 by another Belfast Gaelic Leaguer, Bulmer Hobson.

[18][19] This patronage extended to financing the theatre's journal, which was named Uladh (the word for Ulster in Irish), and writing an article, "Art and Culture in Old Belfast", for its first issue in 1904.

[2] He also wrote pamphlets entitled Irish Penal Crosses and The Northern Leaders of 98, a novel Aeneas O’Haughan, a collection of fireside stories Four Shots from Dawn.

[7] With Herbert Hughes, Bigger also made a collection of just under 175 rubbings of the heraldic designs engraved on gravestones in County Antrim, which they published in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1900 and 1901.

Others not listed there and not aforementioned include: John Smyth Crone edited his Articles and Sketches (Bigger 1927), a selection of just some of his work, that was published after his death.