The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive guide for anyone wanting to trace his or her Irish ancestors. As the individual circumstances of each family are unique, the relevant areas of research vary widely from case to case. While some areas will be important for almost all researchers, others are more specialised and are therefore extremely important only in particular cases. This book is structured to reflect that division: the first five chapters examine the basic sources and the internet; the following seven chapters detail sources with a narrower application; and the final three chapters consist of a number of reference guides to facilitate quick access to a range of research materials, including county-by-county source lists and Roman Catholic records.

How you use the book depends very much on your individual circumstances. For someone with no experience of genealogical research in Ireland it would be best to start from this Introduction and work through the early chapters, leaving the rest until the basic materials have been exhausted. Someone who has already covered parish registers, land records, census returns and the state records of births, marriages and deaths may wish to start from Chapter 5. Others may simply want to use the reference guides as a basis for planning and directing their research. However, as anyone who regularly uses Irish records will know, one of the pleasures of research is the constant discovery of new sources of information, and new aspects of familiar sources. The information in this book is the result of many years of such discoveries in the course of full-time research, and it is quite possible that even a hard-bitten veteran will find something new in the account of the basic records given in the early chapters.

WHERE TO START

The first question asked by anyone embarking on ancestral research is ‘What do I need to know before I start?’ Unfortunately, there are as many answers as there are families. Although the painstaking examination of original documents has its own pleasures, in genealogy it is usually better to arrive than to travel hopefully. So, while it is theoretically possible to start from your own birth and work back through records of births, marriages and deaths, parish records and census records, in practical terms the more you can glean from older family members or from family documents the better: there is no point in combing through decades of parish records to uncover your great-grandmother’s maiden name if you could find the answer simply by asking Aunt Agatha. Nor does the information you initially acquire this way need to be absolutely precise. At this point in your research, quantity is more important than quality. Later on, something that seemed relatively insignificant—the name of a local parish priest, the story of a contested will, someone’s unusual occupation, even a postmark—may well prove to be the vital clue that enables you to trace the family further back. In any case, whether or not such information eventually turns out to be useful, it will certainly be of interest and will help to flesh out the picture of earlier generations. For most people the spur to starting research is curiosity about their own family, and the kind of anecdotal information provided by the family itself rarely emerges from the official documents.

To use the record resources fully and successfully, three strands of information are vital: dates, names and places. Dates of emigration, births, marriages and deaths; names of parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, in-laws; addresses, townland names, parishes, towns, counties . . . Needless to say, not all of this is essential, and again absolute accuracy is not vital to start out with. A general location and siblings’ names can be used to uncover parents’ names and addresses, and their parents’ names. A single precise name and date can be enough to unlock all the other records. Even a name alone, if it is sufficiently unusual, can sometimes be enough. In general, though, the most useful single piece of information is the precise locality of origin of the family. The county of origin would normally be the minimum information necessary, though in the case of a common surname (of which there are only too many) even this may not be enough. For the descendants of Irish emigrants the locality is often one of the most difficult things to discover. There are a variety of ways of doing this, however, both in the records of the destination country and in Irish records online. The best time to do it is certainly before coming to Ireland. A guide to staring research online will be found below, and the most useful Australian, American and British sources for uncovering the locality of origin of Irish emigrants are detailed at the end of this Introduction.

The only absolute rule in family history research is that you should start from what you know, and use that to find out more. Every family’s circumstances are unique, and where your research leads you will depend very much on the point from which you start. So, for example, knowing where a family lived at about the turn of the century will allow you to uncover a census return with the ages of the individuals, leading to birth or baptismal records giving parents’ names and residence, leading on in turn to early land records, which may permit the identification of generations before the start of parish records. At each stage of such research the next step should always be determined by what you have just found out: each discovery is a stepping-stone to the next. As a result, it is simply not possible to lay down a route that will serve every reader. It is possible, however, to say that there is no point in taking, say, a seventeenth-century pedigree and trying to extend it forwards to connect with your family. Although there may very well be a connection, the only way to prove it is by expanding your own family information and then working backwards.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO FIND

What you will uncover about your family history depends on the quality of the surviving records for the area of origin and, again, on the point from which you start. In the majority of cases, that is, for the descendants of Catholic tenant-farmers, the limit is generally the starting date of the local Catholic parish records, which varies widely from place to place. However, it would be unusual for records of such a family to go back much earlier than the 1780s, and for most people the early 1800s is the more likely limit. In Gaelic culture genealogy was of crucial importance, but the collapse of that culture in the seventeenth century, and its subsequent impoverishment and oppression in the eighteenth century, have left a gulf that is almost unbridgeable. That said, exceptions immediately spring to mind. One Australian family, starting with only the name of their great-grandfather, his occupation and the date of his departure from Ireland, uncovered enough information through parish registers and state records of births, marriages and deaths to link him incontestably to the Garveys of Mayo, for whom an established pedigree is registered in the Genealogical Office stretching back to the twelfth century. An American family, knowing only a general location in Ireland and a marriage that took place before emigration, discovered that marriage in the pedigree of the McDermotts of Coolavin, which is factually verified as far back as the eleventh century. Discoveries like this are rare, however, and are much likelier for those of Anglo-Irish extraction than for those of Gaelic or Scots Presbyterian extraction.

Whatever the outcome, genealogical research offers pleasures and insights that are unique. The desire that drives it is simple and undeniable: it is the curiosity of the child asking, ‘Where did I come from?’ All history starts from here, and genealogy is the most basic form of history—tracing the continual cycle of family growth and demise, unravelling the individual strands of relationship and experience that are woven together in the great patterns of historical change. Reconstructing the details of our own family history is a way of understanding, immediately and personally, the connection of the present with the past—a way of understanding ourselves.

STARTING RESEARCH ONLINE

The internet is now the first stop for most people beginning family history research, and transcripts of the four major record sources of universal relevance for Irish research are now online. Or rather part-transcripts are partly online. As we shall see, the devil is in the detail.

For someone who had an ancestor living in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century, the National Archives of Ireland census website, <www.census.nationalarchives.ie>, is the obvious starting point. It is completely free, leaving plenty of scope for trial and error; every item on every return from 1901 and 1911 is searchable; and it includes images of all the returns, which are printed and follow a thoroughly consistent format. The sheer ease of use of the site means that even someone whose ancestors left Ireland long before 1901 can glean extremely useful information. Perhaps your great-great-grandfather emigrated in 1850, but if you can pick out his nephews and nieces in 1901 you’re well on the way to identifying living relatives in Ireland. For more, see Chapter 2: Census Records, ‘Using the 1901 and 1911 censuses online’.

The next step in most cases will be to General Register Office records; the state registered all births, marriages and deaths from 1864. The Mormon website <www.familysearch.org> has a complete transcript of the central indexes to these registrations up to 1922 for the entire island of Ireland, and to 1958 for the Republic. The site also has part-transcripts of the actual birth registrations up to 1881. Another website, the pay-per-record <www.rootsireland.ie>, has full transcripts of civil registrations up to 1900, but only for a minority of areas. Otherwise it is necessary to use the index entry obtained online to purchase a print-out of the registration entry from the GRO itself. See Chapter 1: General Register Office Records for more detail.

Once research goes back past the start of civil registration only two classes of record are invariably useful: the property tax records of Griffith’s Valuation and church baptismal, marriage and burial registers. Griffith’s is freely searchable at <www.askaboutireland.ie> and can provide valuable information about a family’s location and economic circumstances, as well as a key to the (offline) records used in drawing it up and in keeping it up to date. See Chapter 4: Property and Valuation Records.

Church records, probably the most valuable source for genealogical research, are transcribed online in two main places, <www.irishgenealogy.ie> and <www.rootsireland.ie>. The former is free, the latter paying. Only some of the transcripts on <www.irishgenealogy.ie> are accompanied by record images, which means that a certain amount of interaction with offline microfilm and original records becomes necessary in most cases. For Catholic records the National Library of Ireland (<www.nli.ie>) is aiming to make images created from its microfilm copies of pre-1880 parish registers available online in the near future. Some caution is needed in using online transcripts of church records: the originals can be in poor condition or fragmented, and the transcriptions can be poor. See Chapter 3: Church Records for more detail.

The internet has been a wonderful boon to Irish genealogy, bringing distant records closer and making opaque records transparent. But it has its dangers. The sheer ease it brings to research can be all too seductive, masking gaps in the originals and flaws in the transcripts. Anyone tracing their ancestors online has to keep in mind that everything, absolutely everything, they are searching is merely a copy of the original, with an inevitable layer of error. This means that knowing precisely what records you are looking at becomes more, not less, important. Saying ‘I found it on the internet’ is the equivalent of saying ‘I don’t know where I found it’. And if you don’t know where you found information, you don’t know what it means.

US SOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING IRISH PLACE OF ORIGIN

CANADIAN SOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING IRISH PLACE OF ORIGIN

AUSTRALIAN SOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING IRISH PLACE OF ORIGIN

BRITISH SOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING IRISH PLACE OF ORIGIN

England and Wales

Scotland

Civil and census records are available at the General Register Office (New Register House), Princes Street, Edinburgh EH1 3YT. The Scottish Record Office is next door and holds a vast array of relevant archive material. Cecil Sinclair’s Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors: a guide to ancestry research in the Scottish Record Office (Edinburgh: 1990; rev. ed., 1997) is the standard guide. Almost all relevant records are now searchable online at <www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk>.

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

Because of the central importance of the family in its teachings, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons, places great emphasis on family history. For many decades the Family History Library in Salt Lake City has been collecting copies of records of genealogical value as aids to its members’ research. The collection is now extraordinary: its Irish section includes all of the GRO indexes and a good quantity of the registers, a large proportion of church records, the records of the Genealogical Office and the Registry of Deeds, and much more. More detail is given in the individual chapters.

To work on these records it is not necessary to visit the library in person. Every Mormon temple has a family history section open to non-church members that can request copies of any of the microfilms from Salt Lake City—in effect providing a worldwide system of access to copies of the original records. To those for whom a research visit to Ireland is impractical, the LDS Family History Centres are almost as good. Many LDS records are searchable online at <www.familysearch.org>.