I was recently on the hunt for some mention of my ancestor, Joseph Barker, in Irish records on Find My Past and came across the Dublin Gazette, 1750-1800.  This is an indexed collection that is separate from the other Irish newspapers on this subscription site.  You might have to plough through a long list of results, but it could yield treasure.

The Dublin Gazette was the official newspaper, published every few days to announce various government business of the day, including legal notices, bankrupts, military and official appointments and much more.  Joseph had been an Officer of the Revenue in the middle of the 18th century and I found an announcement in 1761 of his appointment as a Land Carriage Officer...twice? Son too? Typesetter having a bad day?!  Be careful what you wish for!
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​There were also a few selected marriage and death notices.  The language of the period was wonderfully florid and watch out for the old-fashioned typesetting and spellings.  I had to smile when I found the following qualification to a marriage notice for another branch of my family tree.

"William Revell, of Ballymony, in the County of Wicklow,Esq; to Miss Braddell, Daughter of James Braddell, of Copnagh, in the County of Carlow, Esq; with a fortune of 5000l (£5000), which is the smallest of her accomplishments."

So, he didn't marry her for her money (nudging £1m in today's money by one calculation I found), no not at all... it was her embroidery that captivated his ardour!!!!

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'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!

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.