Timeline Genealogy's Posts - The Wild Geese2024-03-29T09:48:35ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogyhttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/68531808?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blog/feed?user=1bfsxkm09zom1&xn_auth=noUsing Newspapers in to Find Your Irish Ancestorstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-11-17:6442157:BlogPost:1282722014-11-17T15:30:00.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84708161?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84708161?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a> I</span>n recent years, newspapers have become an increasingly useful</strong> source for genealogical research. This is due to the massive digitization projects that have been undertaken, making it easier to conduct broad searches for specific references to surnames and place…</p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84708161?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84708161?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a>I</span>n recent years, newspapers have become an increasingly useful</strong> source for genealogical research. This is due to the massive digitization projects that have been undertaken, making it easier to conduct broad searches for specific references to surnames and place names.</p>
<p>Newspapers start to become valuable for genealogical research in Ireland from about the 1750s, when we start to see the publication of birth, marriage and death announcements as well as advertisements. These advertisements are not strictly what we think of in the modern sense. They were notices designed to disseminate important information. This could often include information or a personal nature. Advertisements might refer to a business changing premises or seeking creditors after bankruptcy or a son taking over his late father’s business. Advertisements could also refer to an elopement, the desertion of a soldier or instructions from a husband that local businesses were not to give credit on his account to his wife.</p>
<p>In a notice published in <em>Faulkner’s Dublin Journal</em> in June 1763, Isaac Read of Dundalk instructs businesses not to credit his wife, Mary Read (nee McNaughten) on his account because she had joined with ‘some wicked malicious and ill minded people in order to hurt him’. He also notified the readers that after she had ‘made a practice of raising large sums on her said husband’s credit in order to supply her said associates’ he had separated from her.</p>
<p>Mary Read, not to be discredited by her husband’s claims, published a response in the following issue, denying the charges against her and claimed that ‘to be turned out of doors by force, without being permitted to take with her even a change of linen or any one necessary’ could not be considered a separation ‘which should discharge him from the support of a wife …whom he has for upwards of thirteen years enjoyed.’ She accused Isaac Read of ‘much repeated acts of cruelty’ against her but demurred from ‘shock[ing] the public’ with the details.</p>
<p>These notices contain a fascinating amount of detail about the lives of this couple in Dundalk in the 18th century and there are many such announcements that can be found in 18th and early 19th century newspapers, alongside traditional birth, marriage and death announcements.</p>
<p>Traditionally it was the landed gentry, professional and merchant classes, irrespective of religion, who published notices in the Irish press and less so the general working or farming population. Which means that as a genealogical source early newspaper are limited to certain classes. However, newspapers also revelled the goriest and salacious details of court cases and many papers contain word for word transcripts of court proceedings. They cover cases from the most benign petty sessions to lengthy murder trials and these reports don’t discriminate on a class basis. A search of digitised Irish newspapers can often turn up references to family members in relation to crimes and court cases, either as witnesses, victims or perpetrators.</p>
<p>Searches of online Irish newspapers can also pick up obituaries, sporting achievements, academic prizes, graduations, the sale of property, membership of a society or organisation, details which tell us so much more about the lives of our ancestors.</p>
<p>Even if you don’t find your ancestor referred to in an Irish newspaper, just browsing the newspapers for a local area for a specific period highlights the events that formed the backdrop of their lives. Letters pages during the famine contain heart rending accounts from parish priests and local landlords about the suffering that has been inflicted on their congregation, neighbours and tenants. Reports during the War of Independence tell a story of the ambushes and military activity that was happening in a particular neighbourhood. Local newspapers during the Land War describe the ground swell of support for the Land League and the conflicts that took place at eviction sites. All of these stories help us to understand a little bit more about the context of the lives of our ancestors.</p>
<p>The number of Irish newspapers available online is growing and there are a number of different websites where you can access Irish newspapers. The first to go online was the <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/archive" target="_blank"><strong>Irish Times</strong></a> which dates from 1859. Access to the newspaper is by subscription.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.IrishNewsArchive.com" target="_blank"><strong>The Irish News Archive</strong></a> is much more extensive with a large collection of Irish newspapers representing the counties and provinces of Ireland. This collection includes the Freeman’s Journal, which dates from 1763. This is an excellent resource for newspapers local to a particular area. The more local the newspaper the better the chance of a reference to your family. Finally, <a href="http://www.FindMyPast.ie" target="_blank"><strong>www.FindMyPast.ie</strong></a> also has a growing collection of Irish papers, which were scanned by the British Newspaper Library.</p>
<p>Of course what is currently available online represents only a drop in the ocean to what actually survives and there are two repositories that hold the largest microfilm and hard copy collections of Irish newspapers</p>
<p>The British Newspaper Library actually holds the most extensive collection of Irish newspapers and holds copies of all Irish newspapers from 1826 and of course holds many from before that date. <a href="http://www.nli.ie/en/catalogues-and-databases-printed-newspapers.aspx" target="_blank"><strong>The National Library of Ireland</strong></a> holds the next largest collection of Irish newspapers and there is a very helpful page on their website that can be used to identify the extent of newspapers that survive for a particular county. This database can be searched by county or by town of publication and is a great way of identifying newspapers that might prove useful to your research.</p>
<p>For the Irish that emigrated, newspapers in the country where they settled can also be a useful resource. Newspaper death notices in US papers can often state a county of origin in Ireland. This may be the only clue to determining where your ancestor originated. The ‘Missing Friends’ column in the Boston Pilot contains advertisements for family and friends seeking contact with Irish emigrants. The notices can help to identify parents or siblings of your ancestor and their home address in Ireland.</p>
<p>Newspapers are a treasure trove for the genealogical researcher and well worth pursuing for references to your family members.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry?xg_source=activity" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706625?profile=original" class="align-center" width="171"/></a><strong><em>Visit our "Irish Ancestry" Members Group</em></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>Searching for Your Irish Ancestors, Part 5 – Estate Recordstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-09-27:6442157:BlogPost:1204302014-09-27T06:02:34.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707554?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707554?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a> A</span>dministration of the estates</strong> of the landed gentry in Ireland during the Victorian era was meticulous. Large estates employed agents, accountants, solicitors, valuators and cartographers, all of whom created detailed records. These collections, if they survive, can be a treasure…</p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;" class="font-size-7"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707554?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707554?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a>A</span>dministration of the estates</strong> of the landed gentry in Ireland during the Victorian era was meticulous. Large estates employed agents, accountants, solicitors, valuators and cartographers, all of whom created detailed records. These collections, if they survive, can be a treasure trove for researchers.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the 19<sup>th</sup> century the majority of the island of Ireland was in the possession of about 5,000 families. The other 5.2 million of the population were tenants. While many families were tenants of middlemen, you may be lucky enough to find an ancestor who was residing on a large and well administered estate for which there are surviving records.</p>
<p>In order to identify the owner of the property where your ancestor resided, you should start by consulting the Primary Valuation of Ireland, otherwise known as <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blogs/griffith-s-primary-valuation-of-tenements" target="_self">Griffith’s Valuation</a>. As well as recording the occupier of a property, Griffith’s also recorded the ‘immediate lessor’. This is the person to whom the rent was paid. If your ancestor paid their rent directly to one of the landed gentry, it might be sensible to search for evidence of surviving estate records for this family. Once you have identified the name of the landlord there are a number of resources that should help you to locate surviving estate records:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.landedestates.ie">www.LandedEstates.ie</a>: This is a database created by NUI Galway that details estates across Ireland, although its primary focus was on estates in Connacht. This website will provide you with details about the extent of the estate, the families in possession of property and sources for surviving records. This is not a comprehensive listing of estate records, so should not be your only destination when searching for such records.</p>
<p><a href="http://Sources.NLI.ie" target="_blank">Sources.NLI.ie</a>: This is the online version of ‘Hayes Manuscript Sources for the History of Irish Civilization’ a catalogue created by the Director of the National Library of Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s and is probably the most useful means of locating estate records. The catalogue identifies collections not just in the National Library of Ireland but also the National Archives, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and repositories around the world.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.proni.gov.uk">www.PRONI.gov.uk</a> : Records for estates in the Republic of Ireland can also be held in PRONI in Belfast. Families who had estates in Ulster in the 19<sup>th</sup> century may also have had estates in other parts of the country. You might find that their papers are in Dublin, Belfast or even in an English repository.</p>
<p>Using these various sources you should be able to establish whether or not there are surviving papers that might prove relevant to your family.</p>
<p>So what can you expect to find in a collection of estate papers? While recently researching the Loughlin family from County Kilkenny, I discovered that their landlord was Charles B. Wandesford. The Sources catalogue on the website of the National Library of Ireland pointed to an extensive collection of Wandesford papers held by the library. The collection list for these papers ran to several hundred pages, I had stumbled upon a treasure trove of records. In the 1830s, when Charles Wandesford inherited the estate from his mother, he commissioned a survey of the estate. The surveyors report, which was found in the estate papers, provided a detailed description of each townland, including the townland where my Loughlin family were living. The surveyor described the houses of the tenants as nothing more than windowless cabins dug into the ground with sods of earth for roofing. The townland had been persistently subdivided and contained over 200 families living in the most dire circumstances.</p>
<p>At his own expense, Wandesford paid for many of these tenants to emigrate and within the collection of his estate papers is a record of this programme, including lists of the tenants who emigrated. Wandesford also headed the relief committee for his district during the famine. The estate papers include records of relief granted to tenants on the estate, naming the head of the household and their circumstances as well as how much relief they were granted.</p>
<p>ike many landlords in 19<sup>th</sup> century Ireland, Wandesford was in receipt of applications for assistance from his tenants, particularly during the period of the famine. These letters represent the voices of some of the most distressed and destitute families. John Loughlin, the head of the family that I was researching had submitted a request to Wandesford, which read as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I humbly beg to make known my sad and painful distress. I have three in family starving with hunger and cold. I maid applications to the clough committee and the[y] gave me nothing to help me. I therefore most humbly beg and beseech of your Honr to order me some relief and beg so doing your [charity] will save the lifes of me and my family. I remain your humble most distressed applicant etc.</p>
<p>January 29th, 1847 John Loughlin Cloneen”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the height of the famine, John Loughlin was pleading with his landlord for assistance. There are hundreds of similar letters in this collection, including from women who wrote to Wandesford’s wife, requesting clothing or blankets to see them through the winter.</p>
<p>The "bread and butter" of estate records are rentals, a record of the rents received from the tenant. The Wandesford papers also included rent rolls that provided evidence of the tenure of the Loughlin family at Cloneen back to the 1830s. In some cases rentals can date back to the late 18<sup>th</sup> century and can illustrate a land holding passing from one generation to the next, identifying fathers and grandfathers of a family. Estate records can also include leases, although the majority of tenants in Ireland rarely had a lease with their landlord. However, leases for those that did can often be made for a number of lives and in some cases the lives recorded in the lease were the sons or nephews of the tenant. A lease from the 1790s that names the head of the family and three sons might be the only record of these individuals and their relationship that you will find if the parish registers don’t survive for the same period.</p>
<p>Estate records can contain valuable genealogical information but are also a doorway to investigating the social history of the period, starkly illustrating the relationship between the landlord and tenant.</p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Read parts 1-4 of Nicola's "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" series <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1bfsxkm09zom1" target="_self">here</a>.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry?xg_source=activity" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706625?profile=original" class="align-center" width="171"/></a><strong><em>Visit our "Irish Ancestry" Members Group</em></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>Searching for Your Irish Ancestors, Part 4 – Records for Other Religious Denominationstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-08-19:6442157:BlogPost:1138732014-08-19T11:30:00.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><em style="font-size: 8pt;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707302?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707302?profile=original" width="750"></img></a> This is part four in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find the other installments of this series…</em></p>
<p><em style="font-size: 8pt;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707302?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84707302?profile=original" width="750" class="align-full"/></a>This is part four in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find the other installments of this series <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1bfsxkm09zom1" target="_self">here</a>.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;" class="font-size-7">A</span>lthough the majority of the population of Ireland</strong> were Catholic, there were also Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Quaker and Jewish families who appear in the records created by their own congregations.</p>
<p>The Church of Ireland was the Established Church in Ireland. The registers of baptisms, marriages and burials created by each Church of Ireland parish were supposed to be deposited in the Public Records Office. Unfortunately, this means that a large portion of Church of Ireland records were destroyed in the Public Records Office fire in 1922. There were, however, parishes who did not submit their records to the P.R.O. and some registers that survived the fire.</p>
<p>Surviving Church of Ireland records can be found in a number of locations. The Representative Church Body Library (RCBL) in Braemor Park, Churchtown, County Dublin holds the majority of surviving records for the Republic of Ireland. The RCBL have also produced one of the most detailed guides to what survives; Church of Ireland Records by Raymond Refausse, which identifies the location of any surviving registers. You can find out more about what records and catalogues they have available online at <a href="http://ireland.anglican.org/about/42" target="_blank">their website</a>.</p>
<p>The second largest repository of Church of Ireland records is the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) who hold Church of Ireland registers for the counties in Northern Ireland, as well as counties on the border but in the Republic. There is an excellent guide to Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist and Roman Catholic parish registers available <a href="http://www.proni.gov.uk/guide_to_church_records.pdf" target="_blank">on the PRONI website</a> which will tell you the extent of what survives for each parish that they hold records for.</p>
<p>There are also Church of Ireland records in the National Archives of Ireland, in local custody of the church itself and in some local libraries, such as the Bolton Library in Cashel.</p>
<p>So, if you are searching for a Church of Ireland family, your first step is to identify whether there are any surviving registers for the parish in which your family originated and then where those records are held.</p>
<p>While the large majority of Catholic parish registers are available online, access to Church of Ireland records online can be hit and miss. Some of the counties available at <a href="http://www.RootsIreland.ie" target="_blank">www.RootsIreland.ie</a> have indexed some or all of their Church of Ireland records and these are available in their main database. However, check the source list on the website to make sure they do have the records for the parish you are interested in.</p>
<p>The Church of Ireland records for Carlow and Dublin City are freely available online at <a href="http://www.IrishGenealogy.ie" target="_blank">www.IrishGenealogy.ie</a> and the RCBL has transcripts of some registers and vestry minute books as part of the Anglican Record Project, available to download from <a href="http://ireland.anglican.org/about/168" target="_blank">their website</a>.</p>
<p>If you are searching online databases for Church of Ireland baptisms, please note that the mother’s maiden name is generally not recorded in the baptismal register. This means that if you are searching for children born to a Henry Simpson and Maria Fox and you search for all children with the surname Simpson and mother’s maiden name of Fox, your search will be unsuccessful. You need to search for all children born to a Henry Simpson and mother named Maria or Mary.</p>
<p>Many Irish emigrants will have ancestors who hailed from the Presbyterian Church. Although the majority of Presbyterian congregations were and still are found in the area of Northern Ireland, there were also Presbyterian congregations elsewhere on the Island. Tracking down Presbyterian records can also be challenging.</p>
<p>If your ancestors originated in Ulster (Northern Ireland), and you have identified the parish or area in which they may have originated, you can identify the Presbyterian congregations for that parish using the Guide to Church Records on <a href="http://www.proni.gov.uk/guide_to_church_records.pdf" target="_blank">the PRONI website</a>. Please be aware that there was often more than one congregation in each parish and I have occasionally found a family who attended a congregation in a neighbouring parish, because it was geographically closer to their home.</p>
<p>The majority of these records are available on microfilm in PRONI in Belfast and a portion of these records have been indexed and made available online through websites like <a href="http://www.RootsIreland.ie" target="_blank">www.RootsIreland.ie</a>. However, don’t rely on all of these records being available online.</p>
<p>If you cannot find the records you are searching for at PRONI, you should contact the Presbyterian Historical Society in Belfast for information on where you may locate the records. The PHS also hold <a href="http://www.presbyterianhistoryireland.com/" target="_blank">a collection of Presbyterian records</a>, including some from the Republic of Ireland.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that some Presbyterian families also attended the local Church of Ireland parish, particularly for marriages. As the Established Church, the Church of Ireland was seen as the legitimising religious authority. Both Catholics and Presbyterians were subjected to the Penal Laws in 18th century Ireland. A wealthy Presbyterian family entering into a marriage may have used the Church of Ireland to make sure that the marriage, which may have involved the transfer of property, was recognised by the authority of the state, the Church of Ireland. If you are searching for Presbyterian ancestors, don’t rule out the possibility that they also used the local Church of Ireland.</p>
<p>The extent of Church of Ireland and Presbyterian records vary from parish to parish. Many parishes don’t have records prior to the 1870s or 1880s, but you can still find parishes where the registers date from the 17th or 18th century, which can be a real boon to your research.</p>
<p>If you are pursuing ancestors through these records, your first job is to identify the parish or parishes where your ancestor may have originated and then determine what, if any, records survive for those parishes and where those records are located. Many researchers of Church of Ireland or Presbyterian records will have to visit the repository where the records are held, as not everything is available online.</p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry?xg_source=activity" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706625?profile=original" class="align-center" width="171"/></a><strong><em>Visit our "Irish Ancestry" Members Group</em></strong></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>Searching for Your Irish Ancestors, Part 3 – The Roman Catholic Parish Registerstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-07-23:6442157:BlogPost:1064972014-07-23T13:30:00.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706573?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706573?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part four in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find…</em></span></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;" class="font-size-7"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706573?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706573?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part four in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find the other installments of this series <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1bfsxkm09zom1" target="_self">here</a>.</em></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: book antiqua,palatino;" class="font-size-7"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706573?profile=original"></a>I</span>f your ancestor was born in Ireland</strong> prior to 1864, when compulsory civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was introduced, the only source for birth and marriage records are parish registers.</p>
<p>The majority of the Irish population was Roman Catholic, so Roman Catholic parish registers are a vital source for anyone searching for their Irish ancestors. Parish registers usually record baptisms and marriages. It is rare to find 19th century Roman Catholic parish burial records.</p>
<p>The original parish registers are usually still held by the parish priest. But before you go rushing off to knock on the door of the parochial house or write to the priest of the parish in which your ancestors originated, you should be aware that the parish is under no obligation to let you look at these registers and in many cases the parish priest will be too busy to trawl through the registers on your behalf.</p>
<p>However, all is not lost, the National Library of Ireland hold microfilm copies of nearly all surviving parish registers for Ireland (including Northern Ireland). If you can make it to Dublin, you can search these records at your leisure and you can access much more than just the records for one parish.</p>
<p>Many of the surviving parish registers have now also been digitised and are available online, although not all on the one website. Before you sign up to search any website for parish baptism or marriage records, make sure that they have the records that you need.</p>
<p>If your ancestor was born in Ireland, there should be a baptismal record for them. However, not all parish registers survive for early periods. In fact, for counties like Mayo and Donegal, many of the records don’t commence until the 1850s or 1860s. This means that there is a possibility that your ancestor was baptised in a parish for which the records no longer survive.</p>
<p>Early parish registers are not always entirely complete. There are often missing pages, pages that are so faded as to be illegible and even missing registers. Large parishes often had more than one chapel in which baptisms took place. Each chapel may have maintained its own register. The current surviving collection may not include all registers for the parish. This means that if you don’t find evidence of your ancestor in a specific parish, it may be because of missing records. If you cannot find evidence of your ancestor, try searching for evidence of their siblings. This will at least confirm that the family were residing in the parish you are investigating.</p>
<p>Many Roman Catholic parish registers were written in Latin, while this does not usually affect the spelling of surnames, it can mean that Christian names will be written in Latin, so bear this in mind. James can be recorded as Jacob, Mary as Maria and William as Guillium and other such variants.</p>
<p>You are also relying on the penmanship and accuracy of the parish priest who created the record. This was not always reliable. I have often stumbled across a set of baptismal records for known children of a family, however, in several cases the parish priest has incorrectly recorded the mother’s first name or even her maiden name. Remember, your ancestors may not have been literate and may not have recognised an error and even if they had, they certainly would not have corrected the parish priest. In cases where a baptism took place at home, the parish priest may have just made a note of the details on a scrap of paper for entry in the register at a later date – this leaves plenty of room for error.</p>
<p>So, before you start searching parish registers, in person or online, it is important to be aware of some of the limitations of these records such as gaps in the registers, faded pages, Latin first names and inaccurate recording.</p>
<p>The majority of parish registers for Ireland are available online at <a href="http://www.rootsireland.ie">www.RootsIreland.ie</a> . This is a pay per view website, which can be searched using parents’ names as well as the name of the individual who was baptised. This is helpful for locating siblings or all the children born to one family, particularly if your own ancestor's baptismal record cannot be found. When using this website bear in mind that the search engine requires an exact spelling for the first name field, for this reason, I usually only use the first letter of the first name, P for Patrick and M for Mary or Margaret. This is because some names may be recorded as Pat, Pk, Ptk, Patt or Mary, Maria, Maryann. By just using the first initial, I will avoid missing a potentially vital records. The search engine does, however, undertake a broad search for surnames, so it doesn’t matter if the surname spelling is not exactly as it was recorded in the register. However, if you are aware of the different variant spellings of your surname, you should always check the database under each variation.</p>
<p>Before you use the records on RootsIreland.ie, you should always check their source list – this will tell you what parish registers they have online. Many counties may be missing one or two registers or you may find registers that don’t survive for the period you are researching. If this is the case, you will not find relevant records, no matter how many times you try.</p>
<p>The second website for Irish parish registers is <a href="http://www.irishgenealogy.ie">www.IrishGenealogy.ie</a> where you will find the records for Dublin City, Kerry, parts of Cork and the Church of Ireland records for Carlow. This is a free website and easy to use. If your ancestors hailed from Cork, Kerry or Dublin City, this will be a very valuable resource for your research. There is no source list on the website that identifies the earliest surviving date for each register that they hold, so it can be difficult to determine the extent of the records available in this online collection.</p>
<p>You can now also find a very small collection of Roman Catholic parish registers on <a href="http://www.ancestry.com">www.Ancestry.com</a> for various parts of the country, but this is by no means a complete collection.</p>
<p>In order to get a sense of the extent of parish registers that survive for Ireland, I would recommend that you visit John Grenham’s excellent website: <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor">www.IrishTimes.com/ancestor</a> and use the ‘Placename’ section to review the maps of Roman Catholic parishes for each county. By clicking on the link for each Roman Catholic parish you will be brought to a table that identifies the earliest surviving record as well as the online location of that register and the call number for microfilm copy of the register in the National Library of Ireland. This will help you to determine whether the records for the area in which you are interested survive for the period your ancestor was born, or married and where you will find online and microfilm copies of the records.</p>
<p>If you are using land records to identify where your family originated in Ireland, bear in mind that land records refer to the civil parish in which your ancestor was living. Catholic parishes differ from civil parishes. A Catholic parish may contain one or more civil parishes. The boundaries are often different as are the names of the parish.</p>
<p>If your ancestor stated on his emigration records or a newspaper obituary that he came from Kilfeacle in Co. Tipperary, you will discover that Kilfeacle is a civil parish which actually corresponds with the Roman Catholic parish of Golden. However, the Roman Catholic parish of Golden also contains all or part of the civil parishes of Boytonrath, Dangandargan, Dogstown, Killeenasteena and relickmurry and Athassel. This can get very confusing. To make matters worse, some Roman Catholic parishes went by different names in the various calendars and indexes where they have been listed for genealogists. John Grenham’s website should help you to identify all potential names under which the parish will be listed.</p>
<p>It is quite common for an emigrant to name the Roman Catholic parish in which they originated, rather than the civil parish. This means that in order to locate land records for your family, you will have to identify the civil parishes within that Roman Catholic parish.</p>
<p>Research of parish registers requires patience, but can be ultimately rewarding, especially when you decipher that 1807 baptismal record that gives the address of your great, great, great grandfather or the baptismal record where the parish priest has also noted the marriage details of the child. I have even found references to marriages that took place in the US, Canada and England, recorded beside the baptism of the child in an Irish parish register. For children born outside of marriage, you can sometimes find comments by the parish priest written in the margin and on rare cases the father of the child may be named, if his identify was known to the parish priest.</p>
<p>When using online databases for Irish parish registers, always try to track down a copy of the original register. There microfilm copies that can be found in the National Library of Ireland can also be ordered through most Family History Centre Libraries. By checking an image of the original register, you can make sure that there have not been any mistakes in transcription and it is illuminating to see the handwritten record that may be over 150 years old.</p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry?xg_source=activity" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706625?profile=original" class="align-center" width="171"/></a><strong><em>Visit our "Irish Ancestry" Members Group</em></strong></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>Searching for Your Irish Ancestors, Part 2 – Birth Recordstag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-06-17:6442157:BlogPost:996182014-06-17T09:30:00.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706298?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706298?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part two in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can…</em></span></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706298?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706298?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" class="align-full" width="750"/></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part two in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find the other installments of this series <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1bfsxkm09zom1" target="_self">here</a>.</em></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706298?profile=original" target="_self"></a>I</span>n the last post ‘<a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blogs/searching-for-your-irish-ancestors-getting-started" target="_self"><strong>Getting Started</strong></a>’</strong> I recommended information that you should try to gather about your Irish-born ancestor from the sources in the country in which they settled. If you have been successful in identifying your Irish-born ancestor, their name, approximate year of birth, place of birth and the names of their parents, you are ready to start searching for evidence of your family in Irish records. Even if you have not found all of this information, you may want to start looking for evidence of your family in Ireland.</p>
<p>Birth or baptismal records are one of the first places to start when searching for your ancestors in Ireland. There are two sources for births in Ireland: Records for civil registration, and parish baptismal registers.</p>
<p><strong>Civil registration</strong> in Ireland commenced in 1864, when it became compulsory to register all births, deaths and marriages. It should be noted that non-Catholic marriages in Ireland were actually registered from 1845.</p>
<p>If your Irish-born ancestor was born or married in Ireland after 1864, you should start by searching for a record of this event in the civil birth or marriage registers. Irish civil birth certificates record the name, date and place of birth of the child as well as the names of the parents, the mother’s maiden name and occupation of the father. The address given on an Irish civil birth certificate will be the townland where the family were residing at the time of the birth. This is the most specific address that you will find for your family in Ireland.</p>
<p><strong>Irish civil marriage registrations</strong> are even more informative. While recording the names, ages and occupations of the bride and groom, a marriage certificate also recorded the names and occupations of their fathers and their addresses prior to marriage, the name of the church in which they married and the names of the witnesses. If you don’t know where your Irish-born ancestor originated in Ireland - but you know that they married in Ireland - their civil marriage record should help you to establish their family address as well as the father’s name and occupation.</p>
<p>To start with, you need to identify your ancestor in the civil birth index - an annual index of all registered births in every county in Ireland - which dates from 1864. The index can be searched by surname. Before you start searching the index, make sure you are aware of all possible variants of your ancestor’s surname. Surnames like McDonagh can come in many different variations, and you should check all variants in the index. Although your own family may have used a specific spelling of your surname, it doesn’t mean that the clerk who recorded the birth entry used the same spelling.</p>
<p>You should also try to identify the registration district in which the birth is likely to have taken place. The registration district corresponds with the Poor Law Union or Union. In fact, it was the responsibility of the local medical dispensary of the Union to record the registration of births.</p>
<p>In order to identify the registration district in which your ancestor might have been born or married, I would recommend consulting the following Poor Law Union Maps:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/browse/counties/plumaps/index.cfm?UserID=" target="_blank">http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/browse/counties/plumaps/index.cfm?UserID=</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/browse/counties/plumaps/index.cfm?UserID=" target="_blank"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84706189?profile=RESIZE_320x320" class="align-right" width="300"/></a>You can also find a helpful guide to registration districts for each county in Ireland at the following website:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/Ireland-civil-registration.html" target="_blank">http://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/Ireland-civil-registration.html</a></p>
<p>Just because a family lived within one registration district, does not mean that they didn’t use a neighbouring district. If the neighbouring district was closer, they would most likely have gone there, so include some of the neighbouring districts in your search.</p>
<p>The indexes for the Irish civil birth and marriage registers are available to consult in the GRO (General Registry Office) Research Room on Werburgh Street in Dublin. These index books also include any late registrations, which are often entered by hand in the margin or are indexed at the back of the book as well as overseas and army births. These can be important for Irish men serving overseas in the British Army and whose children were born abroad.</p>
<p>If you cannot make it to Dublin to consult these indexes, you can access them online at <a href="http://www.FamilySearch.org" target="_blank">www.FamilySearch.org</a>. The Irish collection on FamilySearch includes many sources; if you want to just look at the Irish civil birth registration indexes, make sure you specify this collection when you are filling in the search form. The indexes, online or in Dublin, will provide you with the name of the individual, the year of the birth, the registration district in which the birth was registered and the volume and page number on which the birth registration appears. From 1878, the books were also divided into quarters. Don’t forget to make a note of which quarter the event was registered in.</p>
<p>If you locate a reference in the index that is relevant to your family, you will need to order a copy of the original registration in order to see the parents’ names and family address and exact date of birth. Once you have the year, registration district, quarter, volume and page number, you can order copies online at:</p>
<p><a href="http://timeline.ie/irish-genealogy/irish-birth-death-and-marriage-records/" target="_blank">http://timeline.ie/irish-genealogy/irish-birth-death-and-marriage-records/</a></p>
<p>Although it was compulsory to register all births, deaths and marriages, it is estimated that up to 15% of births and marriages and an even higher percentage of deaths went unregistered in the 19th century. This may explain why you cannot find your Irish born ancestor in the Irish civil birth records, their birth simply may not have been registered. As it was compulsory to pay a fee to register a birth (and you were fined if you registered a birth late), some families avoided registration altogether.</p>
<p>In some instances, in order to avoid the fine of late registration, I have seen families change the date of birth of the child so that it fits into the three month window in which the birth should have been registered. This means you might find the case of a child who was baptised in March 1873, but was given a registered birth date of October 1873 nine months later!</p>
<p>Children who were born in hospitals and institutions were often registered without a first name. In the index they will appear as an unnamed female or male child. This can make it particularly difficult to locate a relevant record.</p>
<p>From 1903 the Irish civil birth index also recorded the mother’s maiden name. Unfortunately, the online index at <a href="http://www.Familys">www.Familys</a>Search.org (and also at <a href="http://www.FindMyPast.ie" target="_blank">www.FindMyPast.ie</a> and <a href="http://www.Ancestry.com" target="_blank">www.Ancestry.com</a>) fail to introduce this additional reference until the 1930s.</p>
<p>When you are searching the records on <a href="http://www.FamilySearch.org">www.FamilySearch.org</a>, you may also find that there are abstracts of birth records from the Irish civil birth register. These records were part of the International Genealogical Index and are abstracts from the Irish civil birth register. Unfortunately, these abstracts don’t include father’s occupation or the townland address at the time of birth, which means that it may still be necessary to purchase the original registration entry.</p>
<p>If your ancestor’s birth was not registered or took place prior to 1864, you will need to consult parish baptismal registers for evidence of their baptism.</p>
<p>Next time, I will tackle locating and searching parish registers for baptisms in Ireland.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Read the first article in this series:</strong> <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blogs/searching-for-your-irish-ancestors-getting-started" target="_self">Searching for Your Irish Ancestors – Getting Started</a></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/forum/topics/brick-walls-let-s-hear-em" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>Searching for Your Irish Ancestors, Part 1 – Getting Startedtag:thewildgeese.irish,2014-05-16:6442157:BlogPost:932882014-05-16T13:30:00.000ZTimeline Genealogyhttps://thewildgeese.irish/profile/TimelineGenealogy
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705679?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705679?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part one in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can…</em></span></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705679?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705679?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" class="align-full" width="750"/></a></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em>This is part one in a series of articles on "Searching for Your Irish Ancestors" written by <strong>Ireland-based professional genealogist Nicola Morris</strong> of <a href="http://timeline.ie" target="_blank">Timeline Genealogy</a>. You can find the other installments of this series <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1bfsxkm09zom1" target="_self">here</a>.</em></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-7" style="font-family: 'book antiqua', palatino;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705679?profile=original" target="_self"></a>R</span>esearching your ancestry in Ireland</strong> can be a challenge. This is because of the loss of records such as the 19<sup>th</sup> century census returns and the lack of sources that document the labourers, small farmers and tenement families who occupied this island over 100 years ago. Although finding your ancestor in Irish records might be difficult, there is plenty of work that you can do in advance that will help you on this journey. You never know what scrap of information gleaned from a census return, newspaper death notice or an old family letter, will be the crucial clue that locates your family in Ireland.</p>
<p>You should start by confirming which of your ancestors was actually born in Ireland. Don’t just rely on family tradition or the fact that your surname is Irish. Your Irish born ancestor may have emigrated in the 18<sup>th</sup> century or even earlier. Start by locating your family on census returns. Census returns should state where your ancestor was born. US census return will tell you where the parents of your ancestors were born, which will help if you are unsure which generation of your family was born in Ireland.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-3">Year of Birth</span></strong></p>
<p>The census will also help you to establish when your ancestor was born. Don’t just rely on one particular census for a year of birth for your ancestor, always check every census during the period your ancestor was alive as you may find that their year of birth may differ. This was not uncommon as many Irish emigrants did not keep track of their age or knew their exact date of birth. Don’t get too attached to a particular date of birth, even if your ancestor celebrated this date as their birthday. I have rarely found an Irish emigrant who was actually born on the date that they gave. When required to provide a date of birth for a form, some emigrants adopted a new date of birth such as the date of their arrival, Christmas day or St. Patrick’s Day. These dates may not be their true date of birth. You might also find that your ancestor was five or even more years older or younger than they stated, so use the ages given on census returns and other documents to establish an approximate year or period when your ancestor was born.</p>
<p>It is always important to try and find your ancestor in all surviving census returns. Information required for census returns varied from decade to decade. Some returns may indicate the year of emigration or the number of years married. You may find another family member, such as a sibling or widowed mother, residing with your ancestor in one particular census, you never know what other family members might be in your ancestor’s house on a given year.</p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Parents' Names</strong></span></p>
<p>Parents’ names can be vital when it comes to searching for your ancestors in Ireland. You may find that there are numerous children born in Ireland with the same name during a particular period. For example, if you have established that your ancestor was James Reilly who was born in Ireland in about 1873, you will probably find seven or eight children of this name in the Irish civil birth register. In order to identify the correct child, you need to know his place of birth or his parents’ names.</p>
<p>Parents’ names can often be recorded on civil death certificates and for this reason you should make locating death certificates for any of your Irish born ancestors one of your priorities.</p>
<p>Parents’ names can sometimes be recorded on marriage records, such as marriage licences or church marriage records. If you find a marriage certificate for your ancestor, but it doesn’t record their parents’ names, check for other documentation, such as a licence or church record, which may have the information you need.</p>
<p>If your Irish born ancestor emigrated as a child, they were likely accompanied by one or both parents. Search for evidence of their parents in census returns. You can sometimes find that the widowed mother of the emigrant followed her family overseas and may be found living with your ancestor, you might also find a parent buried in the family grave.</p>
<p>If you cannot find marriage or death records for your Irish born ancestor, try searching for the same records for a sibling who also emigrated. A death certificate for a brother or sister may hold the key to your search.</p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Place of Birth</strong></span></p>
<p>Place of birth is also another vital piece of information that you will require before you start your research in Ireland. Prior to 1864, when civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was introduced in Ireland, there is no one indexed source for all births, deaths and marriages for the entire country. For this reason, unless your surname is very unusual, you will need to know at least the county of birth of your ancestor, so that you can focus on the surviving records for that area.</p>
<p>There are a few sources that can sometimes record your ancestor’s place of birth. Start by searching for a gravestone inscription or newspaper death notice for your ancestor, these can sometimes state a place of birth. Although census returns generally only recorded the place of birth as Ireland, always check for more specific information. The 1891 UK census often recorded a county or town of birth in Ireland.</p>
<p>Passenger and emigration records can also contain a specific Irish addresses for your ancestor.</p>
<p>If you don’t find any records for your ancestor that state their place of birth, try searching for the same records for the parents or siblings of your ancestor who also emigrated.</p>
<p>If you are still having difficulty locating a place of birth, you could try looking at other emigrants who settled in the same area. If your ancestor emigrated in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century, it is most likely that they emigrated with or followed other family members or neighbours from the same part of Ireland. Try looking for evidence of where their Irish born neighbours originated. If they all came from the same place and settled together after emigration it could be the clue you need to identify the place where your family originated.</p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Year of Emigration</strong></span></p>
<p>It can be helpful to try and determine when your Irish born ancestor emigrated. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, a year of emigration might lead to you to passenger records. Passenger records may identify other family members who travelled with your ancestor or a family member who was already settled in the country of destination. Later passenger record can also record a home address in Ireland.</p>
<p>The year of emigration may help you to establish whether your ancestor married and had children in Ireland prior to departing for the new world. When searching for your family in Ireland, you should always start with the latest event in their lives, as there is more likelihood of a record surviving. This may mean that you start your search in Ireland looking for the birth of your ancestor’s children or a record of their marriage prior to emigration. These records may point to a place of origin where you can identify earlier generations of your family in Ireland.</p>
<p>Not all of the records that I have recommended are available on websites like <a href="http://www.ancestry.com">www.Ancestry.com</a> and you may need to contact state archives and records offices for marriage and death records or look for the graveyard where your ancestor died for a gravestone. You will need to find out where historic newspaper collections are held to search for death notices. Although this information may not be online at tips of your fingers and may require time to track down, it will be vital for locating your family in Ireland.</p>
<p>Family history research is about leaving no stone unturned in your search for your ancestors, and you never know what wonderful little gems or vital clues you will uncover as you dig. I was recently searching for a family in Co. Mayo. At the outset, all we knew was that John O’Brien was born ca. 1856 in Co. Mayo to a father named Michael. I found that there were just too many children named John born to fathers of that name in Co. Mayo for us to identify the correct family. However, an old family letter that came to light gave us some important clues. In the two letters written from Ireland by John’s sister, Mary, she referred to the death of their landlord, a Mr. Hare, to John’s brother, Richard, who was still at home, and Richard’s son, James. There was also a reference to the death of John’s father, Michael. Using the dates on the letters we were able to establish when Michael died. A search for his death certificate found a number of men of this name who died during the relevant period. When we cross referenced the addresses on the death certificates with the names of landlords in Co. Mayo, we found only one O’Reilly family who were leasing their property from a man named Hare. A bit more digging found that in the same parish a Richard O’Brien married and had a son, James, at the same address where Michael O’Brien died. The vague clues from these letters provided us with the proof that we needed to identify the house and land holding for John O’Brien’s family in Ireland.</p>
<p></p>
<p>So don’t give up searching for clues and if you don’t find what you need on Ancestry, it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, it might just take a bit more leg work to track down. </p>
<p>Next time, I will be looking at where to start with Irish records.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry" target="_self">Find more help for researching your ancestry.</a></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"><strong><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"><img width="100" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/84705688?profile=RESIZE_180x180" class="align-left" width="100"/></a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><strong>Nicola Morris</strong> is a consultant genealogist for the <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/forum/topics/brick-walls-let-s-hear-em" target="_self">Irish Ancestry Group</a> at The Wild Geese. She has a degree in History from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked in genealogy since 1999 and in 2007 set up <a href="http://timeline.ie/irish-genealogy/commissioning-genealogical-research/" target="_blank">Timeline Irish Research</a>, offering professional genealogical research services to clients at home and abroad. As well as offering a professional genealogical research service, Nicola also works on house and building histories and histories of institutions and organisations and wrote a history of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland in 2008. <a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self">Read more about Nicola.</a></em></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-1"><em><br/> <span style="font-size: 10pt;"><a href="http://thenewwildgeese.com/group/irish-ancestry/page/nicola-morris-bio" target="_self"></a></span></em></span></p>