Many Irish place names have their linguistic roots in the Irish language and speak of nature, landscape features or buildings, perhaps long since built over or demolished.
 
​If you've ever made an Irish road trip you will be familiar with bi-lingual road signs like these.  You might even have tried to pronounce the Irish names, sounding out the syllables phonetically, just like my 8 year old self marvelling at "Sio-ban" as an exotic Irish girl's name and being perplexed at learning that Siobhan was pronounced "Shivawn."

I've met Irish work colleagues who were adept at switching to Irish when they wanted to gossip privately, having had to learn the language in order to complete their secondary education and matriculate to university. It's a wonderfully melodic language, don't you think, but perhaps difficult to learn? 

I must admit I greatly enjoyed reading Charlie Connelly's book, "Our Man in Hibernia", telling his story of not only moving to Ireland and being determined to learn the language of his ancestors, but also re-appraising what he thought he knew about their story of emigration to England as he hunted for his roots.

Maybe we should all take the time to learn a few words as for some branches of our tree this may have been the language they used every day.  Therefore, I was interested in a recent post on the Irish Genealogical Research Society's Facebook page alerting me to a free online Irish Language and Culture course offered by Dublin City University, which I might have a go at as, according to the syllabus, you learn some good curses!

However, in the meantime I can at least hear how Irish place names should be pronounced with a somewhat hidden feature of the marvellous free Placenames Database of Ireland website.  Turn your sound on and click on the small white triangle inside the grey circle to the right of the Irish version of the name and you will hear how it should sound.  This is a really good website for finding all sorts of places and from a genealogist's point of view you will also be able to learn other useful geographical information that you may need to find other records.  In the example above, you can learn that Killegar, Co. Leitrim is actually in the civil parish of Carrigallen and the barony of the same name - useful for finding land records.  Oh, and of course, there's a map - always a winner with me!

I've just added a new Ingredients page for Irish Newspapers as it had escaped my notice that I had not highlighted this wonderful genealogical resource that I have mined for so much great information myself. 

There are actually quite a lot of online sources for this resource although not many of them are free I'm afraid.  Some of the standalone services like the Irish Times, Irish Newspaper Archives and the British Newspaper Archive can work out to be quite pricey actually so hunt out deals or perhaps buy a short-term subscription? 




​Of the main genealogical subscription players, Find My Past is the only one that offers comprehensive access to both British and Irish newspapers as part of its partnership with the British Library to create the British Newspaper Archive.  You will need to purchase the right level of subscription to access them, but quite frankly, I think it's worth the money in this instance.  

I guarantee that once you discover and start plundering Irish newspapers for your family history research you will be hooked and will welcome any rainy afternoon that keeps you indoors "dead-diving" in the newsprint!  How else will you ever find deliciously shocking stories like the one hinted at in the snippet above!  And as for your penchant for purple crepe-de-chine, why it was practically written in your genes considering the report of what your great grandmother wore to her son's wedding!

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, just a year after posting how pleased I was to find this resource for helping map townlands and parishes, I have to report that the site has had a major design overhaul and all that lovely historical detail and simple layered geographical display has now disappeared.  The new version looks like the screen grab above at OpenStreetMap for Ireland which you can contrast with a similar screen grab in my post last August.

I've updated my Townlands page with what slim advice I can offer at the moment, but I think I'm going to have to wrestle with it a bit more to see if I can use it as easily as I could the old version.  The site is massively open source and updates are provided by a huge community of contributors, which means it's not obvious who, if anyone, can be contacted to try to find out what has prompted the changes.  If you know any more, please let me know! 

Sometimes we can be spoiled for choice when we come across more than one source for what should essentially be the same information in the same place.  Burials as indicated by memorial inscriptions are a case in point.  However, we can all see different things buried under the lichen (or nothing at all) and alas, we may not all write down everything we see accurately either. 

Therefore, my advice to you is that, even if you think you've gathered all the definitive information for one location, always check other similar sources if you happen across them.  Read on for the tale of Henry Revell to illustrate my point.

 The Revell branches of my family tree were taking some sorting out with most of the evidence relating to family graves in the parish church of St. Kevin's, Dunganstown, Co. Wicklow.

My cousin, Jackie had shared her own original research with me and I also photographed the graves myself in 2016 - you should be able to just about make out Henry's name in this photo, roughly in the middle of the inscription.  However, many of the gravestones had already taken a battering from the "soft" Irish weather, so I decided to try some further sources to learn more. 

The Representative Church Body Library (RCBL) in Dublin had the original parish registers [1783-1858] from which I painstakingly transcribed out all the relevant burials I could find, including a Henry Revell buried in 1840.  This was in all likelihood this man (his mother Jane inscribed before him was buried in 1837 and the John inscribed below him was buried in 1842.)  The RCBL also had an unique source in the form of a plan of the churchyard made in 1908 by Stanley Lane-Poole.  Stanley also published some extracts of this plan in the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in 1909.  Some Revell graves were mentioned, but not this one with Henry Revell?  Stanley also pointed out in his introduction that there were significant gaps in the early burial register compared to his plan, which proved to be sage advice when trying to track down other Revell burials that should have been there!

Who else might help - Brian Cantwell of course!  Brian had done some wonderful transcriptions of many Wicklow headstones in the last 20 years of his life before his death in 1992.  These can be found in printed form in many Irish libraries and archives and are also available, indexed, online with FindMyPast.   But curiously, Henry was not recorded as an occupant of this grave, yet all the other occupants were?  This must have been a transcription error on Brian's part surely as Henry's name was clearly visible to me in 2016?

Joyce Tunstead had also taken some excellent photos of Dunganstown headstones in 2009 and published them on IGP but curiously there were NO Revell inscriptions recorded at all?  Again, given the evidence of my own photo in 2016, this slab was clearly visible along with its Revell neighbour - why did Joyce not include it I wonder?  Other flat slabs nearby were included, just not these ones?

So, in 3 of these sources there was nothing for Henry Revell.  By taking a photograph myself and corroborating via the burial registers, I could eventually confirm his demise, but I was left perplexed as to why several other people had left him, and other Revells, out of their gravestone research. 

Therefore, never pass up the opportunity to check an alternative source for something you think you already know as you may find more than you're looking for.

I'm a geography graduate so I love maps and when I recently found a feast of them on University College Dublin's Library website, I very happily spent an afternoon gorging myself on their cartographic delights.  There are not just links to maps held by UCD but also those in other academic collections such as the Harvard Digital Library.  

The UCD Maps and GIS Librarian has also very helpfully included a presentation on "Free websites sources for historical maps of Ireland" where she gives excellent guidance and practical advice on how to make the most of using these valuable resources.  

I have updated my web page on Irish Maps and Gazetteers with these new links and added some updated advice for wrangling with the  Ordnance Survey of Ireland map viewer.

Maps and clues in the geographical information associated with our ancestors are such a great resource for Irish research that I've made them the subject of a talk that I give called "Irish Research - Getting Your Bearings".  If you would like me to entertain your local family history group with this subject, click on the link above to go to my Kindred Ancestry website and get in touch via my Contact Form.

I should have spotted that the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) update to their main website in March might have caused a few problems with the links on my own page for the NAI.  My thanks to an eagle-eyed genie friend in the US for pointing this out.  I've rewritten my page to reflect the changes and updated the links.

Whilst I agree with Claire Santry's review in March that the new design is much fresher (although I'm not a fan of the boxes flying up from the bottom of the screen ...), I've had a really good roam around the site and do think that there is a lot of repetition and some curiously clumsy advice given for accessing post-1922 wills (see my page highlighted above for my own opinions and alternative options.) 
However, whinging aside, there is lots of good advice and of course a veritable smorgasbord of FREE Irish records to be had on this official site - fill your boots, as they say!

One link I could not see how to restore via the NAI was that to Herbert Wood's 1919 guide to the records.  However, Sean Murphy has recently published a facsimile version of this guide with an excellent essay as a preface, so I've included that link on my NAI page or you can access it directly via the link above. 

Sean has been busy as he has also updated his excellent free Primer on Irish Genealogy, which is well worth a read.  I also recommend taking the time to explore the rest of his Centre for Irish Genealogical and Historical Studies website where he has freely shared other essays and advice. In fact, I've just spotted his Guide to the National Archives of Ireland and am settling down for a good read now!

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.

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!