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 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 just 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!

Having both Scottish and Irish ancestry, I have learned about and used a fair few online resources.  I also enjoy helping other researchers by sharing my advice born of this experience on helpdesks at family history fairs, where people are always keen to collect new URL's by the fistful! 

Irish Geneaography is the labour of love that was born from all my Irish research references.  I also toyed with the idea of publishing a Scottish version but instead opted to have a page focusing on finding the Irish in Scotland as I give a talk on that very subject.


However, I have recently been enjoying some excellent free online Scottish research conferences hosted via Facebook by Scottish Indexes, in which I learned more about great resources, tips and advice.

So, time for a bit of a reorganisation of my Scottish research pages to allow for more content.  You can still find "Settling under the Saltire" under Foreign Fare in the Recipes section, but there are now 4 pages accessible beneath this page;

• Scottish History
• Scottish Geography
• Scottish Records and Resources
• Scottish Research Bookshelf

There are plenty of links to great websites for background reference material, advice and online resources, as well as some book recommendations.  I think I've included all the major sites that you will need wherever you are on your Scottish research journey.  As ever, I've also included a few more esoteric sites that have helped me, particularly with Glasgow research.

"Awah an' fill yer' boots!"

P.S. Don't forget, there is also a page full of practical Scotland's People Search Tips under Kitchen Techniques in the Recipes section.

The National Townland and Historical Map Viewer is a new application from the Ordnance Survey of Ireland and I have to say I am mightily impressed with what I've seen so far.  Not only is it a much more straightforward way of finding townlands on old maps than wrestling with their basic GeoHive viewer, there is the added bonus of being able to compare 2 representations side by side with a clever slider function.

The sample illustration above shows the Historic 6" colour map on the left and a matched up modern map on the right.  This is a great way of being able to see how places that you are interested in e.g. farms or churches, may still exist in the same place, or may have been swallowed up by urban growth.  You can even access great aerial photos to compare to the old maps, which is invaluable in trying to decide where to stick the co-ordinate pin into the cartoon Bing map that is usually the only mapping function most of us have access to in our genealogical software.

I had to ask the OSI how to use the application via the Feedback option - you may be more intuitive than me.  I've written up their excellent clear advice on my Irish Maps and Gazetteers page and repeated it on my Townlands page for good measure.

I encourage you to have a play - there are some wonderful historic features you can have highlighted by choosing them from the layers list.  So, if gas works, gravel pits, sluices and windmills of the 1830's are your thing, this is how you'll find them!

P.S. Thanks to Ciaran for the latest message about the new URL - Weebly won't publish your approved comment? (NOV 2025)  I have updated the links on all my main pages but the link above will still take you to the previous version for as long as it is live as it matches the image.

Whilst searching for something else online, I was recently very happily diverted for a whole afternoon by a curious document I found on the Irish Manuscript Commission's digital resources out-of-print collection.  The Kings Inns Admission Papers, 1607-1867 is effectively a compiled index to various formal applications held in the Kings Inn Library in Dublin.  

Entering the legal profession in Ireland has involved several formal steps over the centuries, including university study to become a barrister or apprenticeships to become attorneys.  Barristers also had to undertake a period of study in England at the Inns of Court in London.  Luckily for us, when these men applied to the Kings Inn Society in Dublin, they had to supply some genealogical information - father's name and profession and education for example. If you are familiar with the Alumni Dublinenses for Trinity College Dublin, you may have seen this sort of information for your ancestor already.  However, the truly brilliant gem in the Kings Inn papers is that mothers' maiden names were also included in the admission memorials.  So, if you have a legal ancestor for whom you are struggling to find a baptism, this might be just the key you need to unlock a people puzzle. 

Take a look at my updated Students, Clergy & Lawyers page for more details.