I have recently been enjoying watching a re-run of Fergal Keane's brilliant 5 part documentary, "The Story of Ireland", on BBC Four.  If you click on the green title, you can access aired episodes on the BBC iPlayer (although access may be time and geographically limited.)  If you can't catch up with the episodes, then the book of the series is widely available (click on this book cover image to go to its Amazon page.)

I've long maintained that you cannot successfully understand human geography, and indeed successfully research your own family history, if you don't understand the historical context of the evidence you find.  Apart from a brief flurry in Scottish primary school where the most exciting thing we learned about was the king who rode off a cliff, I had to choose between studying geography and history all through school (favouring the former right up to university as it turned out.) 

When I started researching my family history, I realised I was woefully ignorant on the history of Ireland and set about remedying this with several texts, of which this book of the series, written by Neil Hegarty was one.  I've added to my Irish library over the years and so, I have re-arranged and added to my Bookshelves to include a few of them on 2 virtual shelves now - Guides and Finding Aids and Histories.  Let me know what your favourites are.

So, my advice, is to step away from the databases once in a while and really research the Irish time period in which you are trying to locate records of your ancestors.  Understanding what was going on outside the church window during the marriage or the lawyers window during the writing of the will or the land lease might go a very long way to explaining why things happened the way they did and perhaps where to look next.

When I first dreamt up this website, my ambition was to create a whole new library of finding aids based upon visually exploring maps instead of playing conventional "letterbox Scrabble" through the traditional database search sites.  Alas, Irish townlands maps especially were thin on the ground (no pun intended!)  I found this a bit of a handicap when trying to do family reconstruction research as it's actually the juxtaposition of several townlands that is important in understanding how families have formed and moved to nearby farms over the years.  I kid you not, I had to resort to printing screen grabs from Griffith's Valuations and getting my Sellotape and felt tips out to cobble together something that allowed me to see these patterns more easily. ​

My Townlands page contains a few examples of third party websites that are a great help at finding townlands and I am delighted to have been able to add another great one to it recently - OpenStreetMap for Ireland. Brian Hollinshead gave a talk to the Ireland Branch of the Irish Genealogical Research Society on the subject of maps for genealogists and highlighted this site in his handout amongst others (see this IGRS page.)

​The OpenStreetMap tool has a number of different layers that you can switch on - I particularly like the townlands and parishes options - so simple and clear.  The image below shows this on the modern road map version that is accessed via the link above, but there is also a version based on older historical maps, which will be great for finding farms and features that might not exist anymore.

I'm still happily playing around with this site - you can literally zoom all over Ireland.  As yet I haven't found a search facility, so you might have to use one of the other websites I recommend on my Townlands page to get an idea of where to zoom into.  Watch out for alternative spellings and even some alternative names - always fun with Irish townlands. This is a marvellous open source project, so you can get involved too - see the OpenStreetMap home page for more details.