I've had a page on the website called "Settling under the Saltire - the Irish in Scotland" for a wee while as I gave a talk on this very subject in Dublin a few years ago.  The page provides details of all the resources and useful websites that I highlight in the talk.  However, I recently completed some Scottish research for a client and enjoyed exercising all my hard-won search skills solving people puzzles on the ScotlandsPeople website. 
I give out a few of these tips in the talk but I realised that there were several more I could share, plus of course, I didn't want to forget them myself for my next foray into the records!

So I've created a new page - Search Tips for ScotlandsPeople - which you can find under Techniques accessed from the drop-down menu under Recipes or simply follow the green link above.  I'll try to remember to add to them if I learn more tricks and of course, it would be great to hear your suggestions for getting the most from this website.

I'm now feeling inspired to do the same sort of thing for my favourite Irish websites and will let you know when they are published.

​I've just completed a bit of Spring makeover of the website with regard to the colour scheme for the many hyperlinks.  Previously they were all bold green, which I've kept for all the links that will take you to another of my pages on this site or my sister site, Kindred Ancestry.   Links to great third party sites are all now a fetching shade of bold turquoise which I hope you find easy on the eye and a suitably complementary tone to the rest of the site colours.

I've also taken the opportunity to tidy up quite a few of the pages and add some new content where I could.  For example, I've added links to the appropriate town or city editions of the Royal Irish Academy's Historic Towns Atlas to the relevant county pages.  These are lovely resources with lots of historical insight in the essays and some innovative clear maps.  As you might expect, the cities of Dublin, Belfast, Limerick and Kilkenny feature on their list, but you might be pleasantly surprised to find smaller but historically important places too, like Carlingford and Downpatrick as well.

To complement the completely updated Church of Ireland Parish Record Finder spreadsheets (see previous blog post), I have also completely revamped the Church of Ireland Parishes & Registers page.  Hopefully, this makes it much clearer about where to look, methodically, for surviving records.   

The PRONI "Guide to Church Records" also revealed that this repository has a large number of Methodist church records, not just for the north of Ireland but also for circuits further afield in the rest of the island of Ireland.  So, there's now a prominent link to that document on the Methodist Church in Ireland page.  The same document also has details of Presbyterian, Baptist and other Protestant dissenting churches, including the wonderfully named Moravian church which has its roots in Eastern Europe but set up shop in Ireland too and was blessed with diligent scribes when it came to record keeping.

So, a new colour scheme and a few highlights of the fruits of my labours.  Enjoy!

P.S.  Old blog posts still have all their links in green though.

What to do when you have so much time on your hands stuck at home avoiding world plague ... I'll just take a look at where I got up to with my county specific finding aids for Church of Ireland records, I thought...  I started out building these spreadsheets over 4 years ago and I have learned so much more in that time.

"I'll just ..." have been the words that have started me off on some epic feats of spreadsheet re-engineering in other areas of my research and this proved to be no different.  However, you all get to reap the benefits of this marathon if you so choose.

​So what's new?

Fully Updated.  All the data is now complete for all 32 counties.  This means that every identifiable Church of Ireland parish for which something survives in either the main Dublin or Belfast institutions or selected sites online is listed with its civil parish, diocese and date ranges.  This has all been done with reference to the most up to date information that I could find today and I can tell you there are quite a lot of changes.  As I could not re-validate the date ranges for the National Archives of Ireland microfilms I had to take that information out.  All those previously empty boxes for Ulster parishes?  Mostly in PRONI of course - hope you like the fuschia... which brings me to...

Toned Down.  Having had a pop at the Representative Church Body Library for their lavish use of clashing colours in their Table of All Parish Registers document, I had to rather sheepishly admit that my own finding aids suffered from a similar Pantone blizzard of shades that wasn't really helping anyone.  This particularly applied to the list of parish names where I had tried to cram in too much information by using different colours.  So, I have reverted to a simpler format that focuses only on the positive - what you can find.  I've also tried to improve the layout with better spacing to make them easier to read and date ranges for the same institutions all lined up which is much more appealing to my OCD!

Look out for the extra hyperlinks in the top block too, which can take you to other sites for more detailed or supporting information.  Take a look at my updated Church of Ireland Parish Record Finder page to see exactly how the spreadsheets work now.  

What's next?  Well, I still need to work out if, and how, I can shoehorn the date ranges for records in local custody into the next version so that the positive list is fully up to date.  I also want to create a separate list of parishes for which we know the records were destroyed for specific periods.  However, you'll forgive me if I step away from Excel for a wee while!

Let me know what you think of the new versions.

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! 

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.

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".