Those of you of a certain age i.e. as old as me, will recognise a genealogical nod towards the great reveal in the classic Cluedo board game in my post title.  If you've never played it, the object was to gather evidence as you made your way around the board, challenging fellow players with searching questions until you believed you had deduced killer, location and weapon i.e. forensically applying logic to solve the crime. 

​Which is pretty much what we need to be doing every time we encounter new characters and new evidence in our family history research. I was reminded of the wisdom of playing "objective detective" when I recently responded to a request for help.

One of the best questions that you can ask of any evidence that you are not sure of is "What would have to be true for this not to be my ancestor?"   Let me explain how trying to answer this question can help guide your research.

So, in the case of this particular family, we were seeking an ancestor's burial place and needed to establish the right death record and start our hunt from there.  One man dying in the Waterford workhouse in 1903 was promising and we did also have his usual townland from the record.  However, the surname was not uncommon in the area.  A perfectly feasible alternative scenario could have been that this was a similarly named cousin of our man of about the same age who had come to stay with the family and fallen ill?  Back to the 1901 censuses and an exercise in family reconstruction was needed.  Ironically, this same census revealed another man of the same name and age living in another similarly named townland but in another part of Co. Waterford!  Logically, if he was going to die in a workhouse, it ought to have been his local one which was not Waterford City.  Still, it would be a good idea to follow him forward from 1901 and "kill him off" separately to be certain.

What if our man hadn't died in Ireland?  Perhaps he had emigrated, hoping to bring his young family to join him but had disappeared or died whilst abroad?  This would need a lot of work trawling through passenger lists and any available overseas censuses or deaths. 

I can't say that we definitively solved this particular people puzzle, but by being forensically rigorous, we could at least support our tentative conclusions thus far.  A famous Sherlock Holmes quote states that "Whenever you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth."  However, as we all know, genealogical evidence is often far from complete and we always wonder what other evidence might be out there that we haven't found or perhaps never survived that would contradict our conclusions.  In the meantime, when you think you have found something promising, ask yourself that searching question and test the alternative scenarios.

For those of you who know Harry Potter off by heart, you will recognise a teenage Tom Riddle manipulating Professor Slughorn into telling him about horcruxes.  For the rest of you who haven't a clue what I'm on about, I'm alluding to some fairly "magical" finding aids that I only found out about the other day that I wish I could get my hands on!

Although I have been patiently scouring the Grantor Indexes and Townland Indexes for many years as I attempt to track down registered deeds, I was not previously aware of the Abstracts Books and haven't really been able to find out much about them anywhere online or in my reference books? They were fleetingly mentioned in a recent talk I listened too when I learned that they were initiated in the 1830's to aid legal researchers in finding the deeds they sought.  Clerks compiled far more expansive index entries with columns spanning 2 pages and listing so much more that the sparse entries of the other 2 indexes i.e. more names, townlands, dates, reference numbers and also for the first time, a classification of the type of deed that had been registered.   

These Abstract Books ran from 1833 to 1969 before being replaced by digital records and are only available to consult onsite in the Registry of Deeds in Dublin.  Apparently, there was also an attempt to retrospectively create them for the earliest records as a volume covering 1708-1717 came to light during collaborative work on the new Anglo-Scottish digital humanities project that I blogged about earlier.  Sadly, it appeared enthusiasm quickly fizzled out and no more volumes are believed to bridge that substantial gap until 1833.

However, I'm not going to quibble about that, but what I am going to release a massive wail of anguish about is that the Abstract Books that do exist were NEVER DIGITISED by FamilySearch when they did all the other books!  Having these online today would make a massive difference to being able to confidently track down the right deeds and make sense of them from a financial and legal point of view.  I've been in touch with the Property Registration Authority of Ireland to see if these books might be included in their new digitisation strategy but no response as yet.

​Fingers crossed!

I've just listened to a fascinating talk hosted by the Property Registration Authority of Ireland as part of the Explore your Archive event (find out more on this PRAI Heritage Events page plus some interesting blog posts). 

"Reading the Deeds and Sasines: Irish and Scottish Land Records" was sub-titled "a digital humanities approach" which meant that I was introduced to the term "word bags" and can't wait to see how this technique helps to improve genealogical research.

Dr. Patrick Walsh of Trinity College Dublin and Dr. Andrew Mackillop of the University of Glasgow are leading a project that seeks to apply emerging technology to the problem of both finding and unlocking the valuable data that is contained in historical land records.  These records are complex beasties that challenge us with their old-fashioned hand-writing and byzantine legal phrasing, including flourishes of Latin.  I was also somewhat heartened to hear that it's not just me who struggles to make sense of what is actually going on in some of these deeds - is the land being sold or leased or mortgaged or what?  The archaic legal language used does not always consistently describe the same transactions in exactly the same way.

By "training" an automatic transcription tool (Transkribus) and applying natural language processing techniques to the text, they have been able to start picking out combinations of similar words or phrases ("word bags") that more consistently identify the type of legal and financial instrument that is being described. 

This project sounds really exciting and I really hope that the results can be turned into a new finding aid that helps us all access these great records more easily and understand more about what we find in them.

The PRAI promised to make the talk available on their YouTube channel but the link is not there yet.  When it is, I'll add it to my Registry of Deeds - History & Future page.