Online resourcesįor Irish online research, the glass is both half-empty and half-full. 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 12th century.Īn 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 11th century.ĭiscoveries like this are rare, however, and are much likelier for those of Anglo-Irish extraction than those of Gaelic or Scots Presbyterian extraction. That said, exceptions immediately spring to mind. In Gaelic culture genealogy was of crucial importance, but the collapse of that culture in the 17th century, and its subsequent impoverishment and oppression in the 18th century, left a gulf that is almost unbridgeable. 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. What you’ll uncover depends on the quality of the surviving records for the area of origin, on the point where you start and the most important ingredient of Irish research, luck.įor the descendants of Catholic tenant-farmers, the limit is generally the starting date of the local Catholic parish records. Don’t begin with Attila the Hun and try to work forward to yourself. The only cast-iron rule of family history is that you start from what you know and use it to find out more. It also covers new ways to trace your ancestry using increasingly popular home DNA kits. This guide contains links to those many free resources, as well as paid genealogy services which could help speed up the process or guide you towards records you may not have known existed. The result is that most people of Irish origin can now take their family back to the second quarter of the 19th century quickly and easily and, for the most part, without payment. Publicly-funded websites such as IrishGenealogy.ie,, askaboutireland.ie, and /proni have gone about supplying the tools to make that possible. Politicians and public servants now accept that it should be as easy as possible for members of the Irish diaspora to unearth the historical detail of the connection, their family history. Their increased awareness of the huge numbers who descend from emigrants, and who cherish that historic connection, has had a dramatic effect. But most of the change has been driven by the Irish and Northern Irish public sectors. Some credit must go to competition in the marketplace to meet researchers' demands. From being a laggard in providing online record transcripts, Ireland has become one of the world leaders. A revolution in access to Irish genealogical records has taken place over the past decade. There has never been a better time to research Irish family history.
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