100 years to the day of the Four Courts fire in Dublin that destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland, the Virtual Treasury of Ireland has been launched online.  This makes freely accessible the first of what will hopefully be many digital resources that seek to fill in some of those terrible gaps in Ireland's documented history that were incinerated that day.

Like thousands of other people, I am still exploring the site myself but I can see the potential for some great genealogical evidence being published on here in the future.  Tempting as it is to dive in, searching willy-nilly for names and places (Yup, I did too!), I recommend you take the time to peruse the User Guide, which you can find on the Help page.  This will help you understand the significance of the coloured dots in particular.  The Help page also has the beginnings of some good research background advice too.

I like the idea of an "Inventory of Loss" (largely based on Herbert Wood's 1919 guide) and an "Inventory of Survival", created by the project team to describe the replacement documents in context.  The concept of Gold Seams is also an interesting one, whereby major archive series are presented as a whole and presumably, we are invited to mine for treasure.  The 1766 Religious Census is one of the first ones given this treatment under the Genealogy tab and I welcome the ability to access and learn about this material through a well written historical background and varied illustrative images.  Under the Researchers tab, you will find the Cromwellian Surveys, which I can't wait to get stuck into properly to solve some place puzzles.  It's important to note that much of this material is also available elsewhere but in perhaps a more fragmentary format, so this way of presenting the material could prove to be much more accessible.

As this is the launch version, there are many pages that are underdeveloped, so you may find yourself running into quite a few dead-ends.  I found this a lot in the proto-catalogue that appears under Browse the Treasury.  Lots of partners, many teasing you with labels to content but no links as yet.  Be sure to check out the Partners via one of the white on black links at the bottom of every page and there are lots of useful contact details there.

I've blogged enthusiastically before about the Beyond 2022 project, which is the driving force behind the creation of the Virtual Treasury.  The team drew together experts in emerging digital technologies and archiving, who are both prone to talking in their own languages.  And therein lies my only niggle of criticism about this launch version.  The current site copy seems to be liberally peppered with technical jargon and the Glossary has a smattering of terms -  "Chunking"? "Stitching"? - that I just know where invented by programmers in a project management meeting and stuck (I know, I attended enough in an earlier life.)  One to look out for though as it hopefully becomes a more frequent label is Born Digital i.e. a record created in an electronic format that has never existed in printed or physical format.  I look forward to seeing what appears under this category in the future.

Griping about language aside (but why all the American spellings?), this site is very exciting and has the potential to be a hugely valuable addition to the freely available online content that can solve your Irish people puzzles.  Bookmark it and keep up with the News page to learn about new content. 

I have been working on some fiendishly entangled Hopkins families that called the parish of Clonegal home in the early 19th century, and as part of this research was following up some later records in the Calendars of Wills and Administrations, 1858-1922.  If you want to know more about these records, then check out my page on Will Probate Districts & Records, 1858+. 

Now, we've all seen images of original documents that are festooned with various mysterious marks as enumerators marked up household returns perhaps or Griffith's field agents doodled in their field books.  Often, we get annoyed as something important may have been obscured or made indistinct.  Not so fast, I say, sometimes those extraneous scribblings might just help you.  Let me illustrate with the examples I found recently in those Will Calendars.

Sarah Jane Hopkins had been living with her widowed elder sister, Susan, when she died in 1914.  Susan had lost her husband, William Stevenson, 6 years previously.  Both William and Sarah had left wills that were proved in the Principal Registry in Dublin.  Here are the calendar entries for both of them.

Can you make out those pencilled numbers preceded by a "T" under their names (Click on the images to enlarge)? 
​If you've already perused my page of guidance on post 1858 wills referenced in green above, you will know that this code refers to a catalogue entry in the Testamentary series at the National Archives of Ireland.  This means that there should be a copy of the will lodged with them.  Sure enough, when I consulted the Index to Testamentary Records in the Public Record Office, Dublin, 15th-20th Century online, I found the following cards for each of these wills (click to enlarge.)

I then followed my own (excellent!) advice and consulted Testamentary Documents in the Public Record office, Dublin to see if there was an online image for either of them.  Sadly, those T reference numbers were not on the list for the various microfilms available online for this resource.  But if I desperately wanted to see those wills, I ought to be able to contact the National Archives of Ireland and request a copy.

Perhaps I just got lucky with these 2 calendar entries, but you never know what might turn up in your own research.  So, if you think you can detect a pencilled entry in the Will Calendars that look like these codes, then be sure to follow it up.

​Let me know if you get lucky!

If Irish geography is not your strong point, Logainm.ie is a great free resource for tracking down unfamiliar place names (see my Townlands page for more information.)

However, it is only the modern spelling of the name that is indexed for searching.  The problem is spellings have never been consistent over the years and there have even been complete name changes between English and Irish variants just confuse us all even more - Parsontown - Birr, I'm looking at you!  


​Older spellings or name variants were on the site but you had to click through on to another page ("Historical References") for each place name you thought might be relevant to see if you could find what you were looking for. 

I suggested to the Irish Government department that runs the website that it would be great if these older variants were also searchable, which they agreed was a good idea.  The site has recently been upgraded and whilst my suggestion has not exactly made it into this latest version, there have been some great improvements.  I have also been able to work out a way of trying to overcome that issue of hunting with alternative spellings.  Read on...

The historical references have now been placed on the landing page for each modern place name, so you can see straight away when a different spelling may have been in use.  Enlarge the screen shot to the right and you will see what I mean. 

There are also reference codes on the live pages (not active in this image) that tell you exactly where and when that variant was found to be in use.  Click on these to expand the reference and open up new avenues of research. Try cutting and pasting the names of any of those documents into your favourite search engine and you never know what you might find online to keep you well and truly diverted on a rainy afternoon!  
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Also prominently displayed on this page are the map co-ordinates for the place.  Cut and paste these into the relevant field in your favoured family history program and you will have mapped the place quickly and correctly, without having to zoom around a sometimes unhelpful modern map that may struggle with Irish townlands.

So, here's my new searching hack... by the power of Google (other search engines are available)!  Let me explain by way of the example townland in the images above.  Some months ago, after much painstaking searching and comparing of old and new maps and eventually landing on the right page on the previous version of Logainm, I had satisfied myself that an 18th century land deed reference to a Co. Wicklow townland called Ballykeroge was in fact referring to modern day Ballyherrig - check the second image above for even more spellings.  But how would I have been able to find that out much more easily with the new version of the site?

Because the spelling variants are now on the landing page, search engines will find them.  I tried this out by putting "Logainm Ballykeroge Wicklow" into the search bar and lo and behold this is what popped up as the first result!
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So, if you're struggling to find a place named in an old document, specifically direct your search to this new updated website with that first search term (Logainm), followed by your place name and ideally a county name (remember there are lots of common place names used across Ireland.)  You might not get as first time lucky as I did, but with a bit of experimentation and patience, you might just solve one of those infuriating place puzzles that might be stymieing your research.

Let me know if this works for you or if you come up with other clever tips for making the most of this great resource.

We've all been there - burning the midnight oil, feverishly hunting for a birth or marriage or whatever, hopelessly scouring the ether for something, anything that will give you the breakthrough you need with your current people puzzle.  My Snacks drawer is rammed with good things but you know that a bit of order is called for and you need to focus on one type of vital life event or type of evidence.

So, join me for a midnight feast where I've organised my collection of links to both reference pages and record collections so that you can focus your research.  There are 7 pages so far, for Births, Baptisms, Marriages, Deaths, Burials, Monumental Inscriptions and Wills. 

Yes, you will see the same links repeated across these pages but that's the way some collections are organised.  These links are not exhaustive by any means but there are plenty to get your teeth into.

Also, you can see that I've been quite careful to separate the different types of event or evidence.  Apart from birth and death, none of the others are a given in the life of any of your ancestors or relatives.  They may never have married or were not of a faith that practised baptism.  They may have been cremated.  Their names may never have been inscribed on the family gravestone, especially if they died very young.  Equally, don't be too quick to write off the possibility that there may be unexpected evidence.  For example, I have seen people remembered on family gravestones, yet they were actually buried elsewhere.  Equally, many people assume that only the wealthy made a will, which is not entirely true.  If your Irish ancestor died in Scotland, there may be an inventory of their possessions.

My advice is to focus on one specific event and try to be as exhaustive as you can when hunting.  It's also very easy to introduce bias when you are hunting - "Did I find the candidate marriage before I found the birth and that's why I stopped searching for any other births when I found one that was about the right age?"  So, be methodical and step away from the keyboard when the sugar rush gets to be too much!  Tomorrow is another day, Scarlett!

There has been a great deal of excited chatter on various blogs with the announcement that the Department of Agriculture in Ireland has broken it's long intransigent silence on the subject of the huge treasure trove of Land Commission records that they have had squirrelled away in a warehouse in Portlaoise for years (see my Land Commission page for more information.)

Why is everyone getting animated about these records?  Because within the folds of vellum may lurk nuggets of your precious family history in the form of leases, marriage settlements, wills, depositions etc. associated with land transactions that might include evidence dating back to the 17th century.

Access to these records has long been denied on the grounds of "privacy", which was not a similar concern for PRONI who have made their allocated records accessible.  So what has changed?  Well don't get too excited.  The first steps in digitising the collection have been prompted by the parlous state of the "finding aids" and it is only these 200 handwritten volumes that have currently been allocated an astonishingly small budget.  According to the current keeper of the records these are realistically not expected to be available online this year, at best next.  As to to plans for either access to or further digitisation of the millions of records that these finding aids index?  I fear it may be many years into the future before these reveal their secrets to us in some shape or form.

This Irish Times story gives a good account of the current scope of the project, whilst this piece has a nice little video that will have you squinting sideways trying to read the names that tantalisingly appear for seconds!

Following some inspiration through my own research and a particularly good talk I listened to recently (see this blog piece), I've had a bit a tidy up and published some new pages.

The Registry of Deeds is a favourite stomping ground of mine and I am always on the look out for good advice and tips.  Coupled with my many helpful links, the page had got rather unwieldy so I've split it into one top page - Registry of Deeds and 5 more focused pages below it;

• History & Future
• Visiting the Archive
• Online Access
• Finding Deeds
• Deciphering & Citing Deeds​

Another page I've been working on for a while is my Chefs - Irish Genies page.  It struck me that there were quite a lot of historical collections and publications that we often refer to by the authors' names - Griffith's, Betham's, Crossle etc., so who were these people?  Mostly Victorian gentleman but a couple of ladies also made the cut.
Sir Arthur Vicars' story was one of particularly high drama!

It was also interesting to see how they built on each other's work, particularly regarding prerogative wills.  Something to bear in mind when choosing amongst the different resources for these records - check any prefaces in whole books that you can download for free that might detail their methodology (something you might miss if you are only playing "letterbox Scrabble" on FindMyPast and viewing single pages.) ​

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.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love horses and rode regularly until relatively recently.  However, as a grown woman, I have a particular distaste for all things twee and overly whimsical and I'm afraid I think unicorn worship falls firmly into that category.  So, witness my latest family history discovery on the left - the coat of arms for a branch of the Irish landed gentry named Smith whom I have recently discovered are my ancestors.  Resplendent with b****y unicorns! 

Or to put it another way in the language of heraldry - "Arg., on a bend between two unicorns' heads erased vert, corned or, three lozenges of the last.  Crest - out of a crest coronet or, a unicorn's head vert, armed of the 1st."  Those of you who count blazoning as a talent ought to be able to colour in this image using that recipe! (Hint - green, gold and silver feature.)

According to the lore of heraldry, unicorns symbolise extreme courage and are in fact the "official" animal of Scotland, with two of the beasts appearing as supporters on the arms of Scotland.  So, I guess that might redeem them a bit in my estimation.

But I still don't want them etched in glitter on adult pyjamas - Marks and Spencer, I'm looking at you!