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 this 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.

If there is one thing guaranteed to get 2 or more genealogists gathered together in a fankle, it's debating the rights and wrongs of how to construct correct source citations!  Whilst there are academic texts to help (Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills of course being the first that springs to mind), people will inevitably come up with their own favourite way of citing evidence.  I use a pattern that I learned from my Postgraduate course which has proven to be reasonably robust and flexible, but evidently needs more work in some areas (see below!)  The various software packages we all mostly use to hold our data often have helpful "templates" for constructing particular types of sources, but a frequent criticism I have heard (and uttered myself) is that these tend to be biased towards American sources and are not always as helpful for sources from other parts of the world.

So, having recently enjoyed learning from several very good videos posted from Rootstech 2018, I am pleased to recommend one in particular that tackles this thorny subject well - "Source Citations - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" by Diana Elder is well presented and nicely illustrated.  It certainly made me think more carefully about how good some of my source citations were.  I thought that layered citations was an interesting concept and one that would have helped solve a retrieval problem I had early this week when I was compiling my military research pages. 

I had some evidence from a source on Ancestry for a relative but when I tried to find the record again online to recommend the record collection, I could not locate it or indeed the collection?  I had failed my own test for a good source citation - it must contain ALL the necessary information in order to locate the EXACT record again.  Although, in my defence, I'm wondering if the record set has been absorbed into one of the other similarly named sets?  Nevertheless, I can see how I can improve how I cite the online evidence I gather, in particular that gained from the increasing number of microfilms that have been digitised for browsing - who wants to have to step through hundreds of pages again when you omitted the image number from your source citation?!  

Remember, for it to be a good source citation, you have to be able to find the same record again or tell someone else where they can find it - anything else is apparently bad or ugly!

The sport of genealogy means forever being in quest of evidence that you know is there, believe is there or just hope is there.  Finding aids abound to help us and arguably, the most common finding aids we all use every day are indexes.  However, all indexes are not created equal as any indexer is as prone to making mistakes or interpreting atrocious or faded handwriting in a myriad of ways as you or I would be.  All of the big online data companies outsource the indexing of huge data sets to the lowest bidders around the globe and so we get various degrees of frustration or hilarity creeping into the data.  

So, let's take the Civil Registration Indexes for England & Wales (E&W) and for Ireland as 2 separate examples - both places you would expect to find lots of your Irish kin.

I recommend that you watch Audrey Collin's recent talk to Rootstech 2018 on how the E&W Civil Registration Indexes came to be created and you will appreciate just how easy it was for many errors to have crept into them well before any 20th century digital fingers started flying over keyboards to create the online indexes we all use today.  FreeBMD is a great free resource whereby volunteers are transcribing the GRO secondary indexes but did you know that there is also another volunteer project, UKBMD, that is focusing on local registrar indexes from which the GRO indexes were originally compiled (are you keeping up?!)  Find My Past (FMP) and Ancestry have then subsequently bought in some of these indexes and / or compiled their own.  That's a lot of different indexes starting to proliferate for the same records, so my advice is, if you can't find what you're hoping to find in one index, try out another one.

The free Irish government website, Irish Genealogy, has their own indexes to the Irish Civil Registration records, whilst I believe both FMP and Ancestry both bought in the index compiled by FamilySearch for the same records.  But it would appear from a recent story on Claire Santry's Irish Genealogy News blog that FMP have now created their own indexes to Irish civil births and marriages but there does seem to be some quality control issues.

Incidentally, I gather that perhaps somewhat unusually, FMP and Ancestry actually collaborated on the creation of new indexes to the Irish Roman Catholic records released by the National Library of Ireland - presumably to keep costs down rather than try to race each other to be first to publish?   So, if you are searching these records in either of these sites, I presume the results should be the same?  I haven't tested this one out for myself yet.

So, the moral of the tale is don't rely on just one index that happens to be accessible via your favourite free or subscription site.  If you want to be thorough and "reasonably exhaustive" in your research, then use as many different indexes as possible in order to compile your candidates.

I recently went to the fabulous Harry Potter - History of Magic exhibition at the British Library with my lovely niece, (also Ruth!)  Perhaps you saw the documentary which highlighted the beautiful manuscripts and objects that helped inspire JK Rowling to create the magical world of Harry Potter and Hogwarts?

Also exhibited were her original handwritten and typed notes, showing how the she developed the plot, for example, what was happening to various groups of characters as the chapters advanced forward month by month through the school year.  Near the end of the exhibit, simple grids literally scribbled on ripped out sheets of ruled A4 paper illustrated graphically how the Order of the Phoenix took shape - chapters set in particular months with how the main plot lines were to be advanced and what was happening to particular groups of characters or individuals (even if they were waiting "off stage" to come into later chapters.)  Being a bit of spreadsheet diva, of course I loved this idea! 

However, another idea took root in the genealogical corner of my brain.  JK Rowling has famously said that she always knew how the entire saga would end and she wrote each book with a view to advancing her characters towards that goal.  A bit like your own personal family history story, if you play if forward rather than advancing ever backwards as we usually do.  You know how it (currently) ends with you and your immediate living family.  Through your research, you may have found quite a large cast of characters whose lives play out in parallel until the paths of some them cross and you move down the "branch" closer to you on the "trunk" of the tree.

So, if like me, you have wanted to get creative and get down to writing your family history story for a long time but have gathered so much research evidence that it all seems too daunting, then perhaps JK Rowling's methods can inspire you.  Design a series of books - the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian years perhaps or maybe your story revolves closely around particular places, say a group of villages from which your ancestors migrated towards a major town or city where you now live?  Pick a layer to start working forward from e.g. all your known Great Grandparents (that's 16 characters.)  Plot each chapter within a relevant timeline, say a few decades, which will allow you to weave contemporary historical events into all the extant characters lives at the same time, plus show how local events helped create the opportunities for them to meet and marry.  Conclude each chapter by introducing the new characters who will play their part in the next ones.

OK, your narrative won't be exotically littered with dragon eggs, Golden Snitches or Deathly Hallows, but I'll bet you have your own treasured objects and tales that will illuminate your story.  Get scribbling!

I've spent quite a bit of time freshening up the look of the site this week as I'd realised that in my quest to share lots of information with you all, I was in danger of creating a book instead of a website.  Yes, there's still a lot of text but I've also finally got around to using some original photos that my partner, Wiggy, took whilst we enjoyed a fabulously sunny (no joke!) holiday in Ireland in 2016.  

This lovely photo was taken on a typical "soft" Irish day when it was raining gently and 2 swans were necking downstream - beautiful.


So, what can you expect to find on the new look site?  Lots of lovely photos that bring the text to life and illustrate some of the things I'm trying to describe better.  The Welcome page is also a lot more welcoming I hope and much clearer with respect to what you can expect to find and how to navigate, and explains that, no, you won't find any potato recipes despite the odd tabs (although, I don't know, maybe I should post a few?)! 

​I've moved a few things around to make the 3 main sections a bit clearer as to how the content relates to each other and I've made my unique finding aids easier to find.  There are also a few new sections, including a list of questions that are answered across the pages under "What's for Dinner" - great if you are pondering a people puzzle.  There is also an updated section on Trinity College Dublin students under Student Days (see also the preceding blog post for some more insight on this resource.)

I've also been inspired to think about some new content, so do come back again soon over the next few weeks to see what's new dishes are served up!

Bon Appetit!

I recently came across a link to a revised digital edition of Alumni Dublinenses, available for free on Trinity College Dublin's (TCD) digital collections page and which I've written about on my new Student Days page.  I had previously accessed this resource through Find My Past (FMP), playing the usual game of letterbox Scrabble to try to find scholarly relatives. 

However, finding the whole book in a digital form was a bit of revelation.  Reading the Preface proved to be most illuminating on how the actual resource came into existence through the sterling efforts of the 2 illustriously named authors (the untimely demise of one of whom we also learn about in the same Preface!)



Basically, the authors wrestled with multiple fairly elderly documents, mostly written in Latin and with sizeable gaps, to create one new unified resource, first published in 1924.  To achieve this, they had to make lexical and biographical decisions along the way in order to be able to match up the same students across multiple original sources to arrive at a concise paragraph summarising their days and achievements at TCD.  By the time the revised edition came out in 1936, they were not only able to add just over a decade of later students (whom you won't find on FMP), but also issued several pages of corrections to the first edition - again something you won't find out about through FMP.

So the morals of this tale are, firstly, don't assume that it is exactly the same resource that appears to be available in different locations - check it's pedigree very carefully(insofar as FMP's execrable source citations let you of course!)  And secondly, take some time to understand how the document you are searching came into existence and be more alert to the potential for possible transcription errors and omissions.  I've tried to summarise what I gleaned from the Preface into some advice on my Student Days page, so hope that helps. 

It seems that the vagaries of name spellings have been driving Irish genealogists nuts for a very long time, so step forward Robert E Matheson, Registrar General of Ireland to bring a bit of order to everything over 100 years ago in 1901!  I came across his book fully entitled “Varieties and Synonymes of Surnames and Christian Names in Ireland for the guidance of Registration Officers and the Public in searching the indexes of Births, Deaths and Marriages” freely searchable and downloadable on archive.org.  

I can’t claim to have read it cover to cover but there does seem to be an alphabetical list of variants that might help inspire you to vary your search strings and wildcards if you’re struggling to find someone.  I must admit though I found myself pleasantly diverted by all the local examples of variants reported from around the country that he documented in the opening chapters – some of them are just hilarious … see page 28  … Nappy for Penelope?!  Gobinet for Abigail?!  Seriously though, there are some good examples that make you think as the equivalents are radically different words.

​Enjoy!

That less than catchy title attempts to alert you to my latest labours of love on your behalf... do read on!  

One of my unique finding aids is an attempt to re-order catalogue entries from the LDS catalogue of their Registry of Deeds microfilms into chronological order by county and Corporation Town.  I managed to do this last year and I hope you have been enjoying the benefits if, like me, you are attempting to track land purchases in selected townlands through the generations.

Recently the LDS decided to make digital copies of these films available for free online, so I decided to convert all of the film numbers into active hyperlinks that should take you straight from my sorted lists to the film that you want.  I have also updated my notes on what to look out for so take a look at these on my LDS Registry of Deeds page, scroll down to the county lists and pick your film.  Enjoy!

I have recently returned from a trip to Dublin where I was presenting a talk to the Irish Genealogical Research Society at their Open Day.  My theme was "Finding the Irish in Scotland". Whilst a great many Irish made the long trek west to America in the 19th century and early 20th century, not insignificant numbers also turned east and headed to Scotland, several of my own ancestors amongst them, as the vexillogical representation of my family tree to the left shows.  You may have similar branches in your own tree or perhaps a sibling of an ancestor has disappeared with rumours of going to Scotland.  



​My advice is to spend some time hunting for them as Scottish records are quite simply wonderful with respect to the level of detail recorded.  You may well find details within Scottish records that will help you to get further back in your research in Ireland, especially if you have not uncommon names to wrestle with.  If you would like some advice on where to look and how to understand what you find better, take a look at my latest dish served up under "Foreign Fare" entitled "Settling under the Saltire".