Bless Claire Santry and her Irish Genealogical News!  As a St. Patrick's Day gift to us all, she has put together a short simple document that details new Irish genealogical records released in 2014.   20 pages packed with all sorts of different types of records with hyperlinks to where to find the records online or find out more about where they reside elsewhere.  She has also included links to her blog entries which originally publicised the releases, which are definitely worth reading too as Claire always checks out anything new herself and gives you an honest opinion.

If you don't have her website and blog bookmarked, then do it now and make time to browse both regularly as there is always great advice and topical genealogical news on all things Irish.

I'm going to be working on getting as many county pages published with at least the basic ingredients on them as soon as possible.  I then plan to add similar spreadsheets to the one you can see on the County Wicklow page which compares Church of Ireland parish register holdings between the RCB Library in Dublin and the Irish Family History Federation online or the Department of Heritage, the Arts and the Gaeltacht church records website (aka Irish Genealogy).  I'll keep the Recipes page updated with those counties that at least have a basic page.

One thing I have noticed when adding the latest counties, and of course checking out the links, is that there is a huge variance in how much you might find on the main volunteer run pages via GENUKI and the IGP - sometimes lots of lovely transcripts, photos, pedigrees, histories etc., but sometimes really no more than the basic ingredients I'm posting links to as well.  Some of the pages have also not been updated in a very long time.  However, they are always worth checking out as you never know what you might be lucky enough to find.

... not even on an Irish Queen, apparently (old adage on choosing the right colours to wear together, dredged up from whatever part of my brain that words of wisdom from old Home Economics teachers go to roost!)  

Seriously though, thanks to all my lovely friends who have given me their thoughts on the new website, amongst which was a plea to change the colour of the hyperlinks.  Apparently, although of course the obvious choice for the Emerald Isle, green can be a difficult colour to see well on screen and I ought to have remembered that red-green colour blindness might be a problem.

Let me know your collective thoughts now before I publish too many more pages that would need to be changed.

Ok, I know that's a completely made up word and unlikely to earn me lots of Google hits, but I like it - it sums up for me the way that you need to think about your family history being a product of time and place. 

Personally, I think there are too many lists to wade through when it comes to searching online, and sadly due to the perennially complex issue of map copyright, I've had to resort to lots of lists on this website too.  But all those lovely green labels are your stepping stones to other great websites that I have found to be great for researching Irish family History and yes, some of them have splendid maps and novel ways of using them to explore our ancestors pasts.

This is most definitely a "work-in-progress" website as there is quite a lot of information to organise for each county, but keep visiting regularly as I publish more county "recipes".  I'll also be publishing my tips, advice and comments on all things Irish in the world of genealogy on this blog too.

Do let me know if you find the website useful and help me to make it better with your suggestions for links to great new online Irish resources.