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Chapter ONE
INTRODUCTION
WHY BOTHER?
"What are you interested in that lot for?
Sure aren't they all dead?”
My mother was not one of nature's genealogists, but she was squarely in a long Irish tradition. For all the brouhaha about genealogy, in medieval and early modern Irish society the real concern was kinship, not ancestry. The Irish were never ancestor-worshippers. The purpose of the family tree was to demonstrate whom you were related to, and there was no compunction about pruning the tree or grafting on to it to produce the right sort of relations. As far as I know my mother didn't invent second cousins, but she did spend endless hours with my aunts patiently teasing out every acquaintance's every possible family relationship. When I asked the central question of genealogy, the four year old's 'where did I come from', the answer was simply 'here.' And until quite recently, that was the answer for the vast majority of Irish people whether they were Southern Catholic or Northern Presbyterian.
Things have changed. Families are smaller and more scattered. Growing up, I had more than seventy first cousins, almost all within a fifty mile radius of my home. My son, by comparison, has three first cousins 150 miles away. When tribes shrink and scatter like this, the question of origins becomes more insistent and the answer more problematic. Why prosperity should have this effect is open to debate, but prosperity also provides the time and the education to explore the question. Only with the economic growth of the last two decades have people within Ireland begun to search out their own forebears and to develop and respect the records that make that search possible.
In any case genealogy has at least one intrinsic redeeming value. The more you come face to face with the irreducible variety of the past, the less seriously you take received notions of race, class and religion. No notion of racial purity can survive the day-to-day erosion inflicted by the sheer diversity that emerges as you follow families through generation after generation. The fact is that everyone's ancestry is mixed. We are all mongrels, and nowhere more than here on these islands.
BEFORE YOU START
There are a few persistent myths about Irish genealogy:
The records were all destroyed in 1922.
Wrong. The Public Record Office in Dublin was indeed destroyed in 1922 along with virtually all its contents. Where genealogy is concerned the most significant losses were the nineteenth-century census returns, the Church of Ireland parish registers and the testamentary collections. Anything not in the PRO -non- Church of Ireland parish records, civil records of births, marriages and deaths, property records and later censuses, to name only a few -survived, and for much of the material that was lost, there are abstracts, transcripts and fragments of the originals.
Irish research is impossibly difficult.
Wrong. Actually there is quite a compact set of relevant records, almost all held centrally in Dublin or Belfast. If you start with enough information -in particular a place of origin in Ireland -research is really quite straightforward.
All the records for Northern Ireland are held in Belfast and those for the Republic of Ireland are in Dublin.
Wrong again. Until 1922 the entire island was one administrative unit. Both Dublin and Belfast repositories have at least copies of the pre-1922 records, with those in Belfast largely but not completely confined to the nine historic counties of Ulster. Only. after 1922 are the records different.
There are seventy million Americans with some Irish ancestry. There must be a fortune to be made.
No there isn't.
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?
Location, location, location -and location -and as much else as possible. Unless your ancestor had an outlandish surname, the minimum you'll need to know is the county of origin, and if the surname is common, even a county or a parish may not be specific enough. The vast majority of Irish records before the 1860s are location-specific, and reliance on fragments or local census substitutes resulting from the 1922 disaster means that even neighbouring parishes may have quite different record profiles. Both standard guides to Irish research, my own Tracing Your Irish Ancestors (Gill & Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1999) and James Ryan's Irish Records (Flyleaf Press, 2nd edition, 1998), include detailed listings by county showing what records survive.
The basic principles of research on Irish ancestors are the same as those for any research:
Be logical. Start from what you know and use it to find what you don't know. Do not presume that you must be connected to the O'Kellys of Uí Máine and try to stretch their seventeenth-century pedigree to fit into your family. Start from Grandpa Joe Kelly and work back.
Be sceptical. Genealogy is not forensic science -nobody (one hopes) is going to jail because of what you uncover -but a mistaken assumption can cause endless frustration and wasted effort.
Be patient. Researching your family history is the work of months and years. Computers and the Internet notwithstanding, there are very few shortcuts.
Be cunning. Your poor great-granny's rich second cousin may have left a lot more in the way of family records than your poor great-granny herself. Following these may tell you a lot more than looking for direct evidence.
TALK TO YOUR GRANNY
Start with your family, the ones still alive. Many families have at least one hoarder of information, someone who makes it their business to collect and record the doings of the relatives and who is only too glad to have someone to sit and talk about it all. Without running an interrogation, you need to be systematic about writing down (or even taping)what you hear. It is not too important at this stage to be certain about everything, but even a half- remembered fact could provide a vital clue at a later stage. Apart from anything else, you will get a much better sense of the people than that provided by bare records of names and dates.
Family papers if they exist are also an obvious starting point, and you should take 'papers' quite literally. For genealogy, virtually anything can supply evidence -photographs, family Bibles, letters (and postmarks), mass cards, newspaper cuttings, deeds, cancelled cheques -and you should take a note, or preferably a copy, of anything which could possibly be relevant.
I KNOW IT'S IN HERE SOMEWHERE
Covering even a few generations of any family can very rapidly yield a few hundred individuals, each with their own events and documentation. Add the fact that most researchers put down. and pick up family history intermittently, sometimes with intervals of years, and you have a recipe for much frustration and head scratching. For some brave and well-organised souls, a few stout notebooks ':and a shoebox of index cards are perfectly adequate. For most though, a dedicated genealogy program can save time and aggravation.
There are hundreds of programs designed which allow you to store, link, print, publish on the Internet, and more. All of them are relatively inexpensive and some are shareware, allowing you to try them out before you pay. The better-known shareware programs are Brother's Keeper, Cumberland Family Tree, and Family Scrapbook.
The most popular commercial programs are Personal Ancestral File, Reunion, Family Tree Maker, the Master Genealogist, and Ultimate Family Tree. All these are North American and the best way to investigate them is online. Go to a search engine such as Google and enter the program name. You can find a comparison of their features at www.lkessler.com/gplinks.shtml. One word of caution. Some of the programs have 'luxury' or 'gold' editions that will include umpteen CDs of genealogical data as well as the program. Almost all this data is North American and will therefore be useless to someone researching ancestors in Ireland.
You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and so on. So, presuming a conservative three generations per century, thirty generations ago, around the year A.D. 1000, you should have had 1,073,741,824 I ancestors -more than a billion. This is several times the population of the planet in A.D. 1000. What is the explanation? It's simple. The calculation assumes that none of the couples over those thirty generations was in any way related. If you marry your first cousin, your children will only have six great-grandparents, not eight; twelve great-great-grandparents, not sixteen; and so on. At a stroke you will have removed more than 600 million of those notional ancestors a thousand years ago, and that's still presuming none of the other generations were related. In fact the chances are that almost all your ancestors were related to each other in some way. In settled rural societies everyone was at least a fourth or fifth cousin. The fact is, we're all more related than we realise. As you walk down a Dublin street every stranger you see has many ancestors in common with you, however far back it may be.
WHAT WILL YOU FIND?
That depends. What you know determines what you will find out. For most people, those researching Catholic tenant farmers, the earliest limit for research is usually the starting date of the local Catholic parish records, which varies widely from place to place. It would be unusual for the records of such a family to go back much earlier than the 1820s. There are many exceptions, though, with local censuses or tenants' lists for particular areas, early directories for towns, some very good records for smaller denominations and, inevitably, copious records for those who had property of any description. The single biggest obstacle to extending research to the extent possible for families born in many other countries is the collapse of native Gaelic culture in the mid-seventeenth century, which left an almost unbridgeable gulf of five or six generations, even for the Gaelic aristocracy.
RESEARCH SERVICES
If distance, lethargy or frustration strikes, it may be a good idea to commission research. There are two main ways of doing this in Ireland. First you can pay an individual to carry out research for you. The usual process is to outline (briefly) what you already know in a letter. If research is feasible, the genealogist will then quote you a rate for a specified number of hours' work, with an explanation of the records to be covered. Payment is normally in advance. You should keep in mind that you are paying for time and expertise, not results: it is, after all, possible that the genealogist will find nothing. The Association of Professional Genealogists acts as a regulating body to maintain standards among its members. You can obtain a membership list at indigo.ie/~apgi
The other route is via the network of local heritage centres. You will find a full list in Chapter 9. If you know your ancestor's county but not a specific location, these centres, with their databases of church records in particular, are the most practical route. Some of the best centres also have database copies of many of the other sources. The usual procedure is for the centre to carry out a preliminary, relatively inexpensive, search to confirm that they do indeed have relevant records before quoting you a full search.
The National Archives of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland both have a genealogy service for personal callers, in which an experienced researcher will examine whatever information you have and outline the best course of research. This service is free.
STARTING RESEARCH QUESTIONNAIRE
Was your ancestor born, or married, or did he or she die in Ireland after 1863?
If the answer is yes, do you know their precise location in Ireland?
And if you know the location, was your ancestor in Ireland in 1901?
If you know the location and your ancestor or any members of his or her family were living in Ireland in 1901, the 1901 and 1911 census returns are probably the best place to start. With the information here, it should be relatively simple to identify relevant entries in the state records of births, marriages and deaths -marriage entries are most useful. From here, all the records relating to occupation and to the locality are available, including church records.
If you know only the county, it may be an idea to commission a heritage centre to search its database if it has completed computerising church records for the county (see Chapter 9).
If you don't know if your ancestor was in Ireland in 1901, you can start either with state records of births, marriages and deaths (Chapter 2), or with church records (Chapter 4). State records are easier to use and probably more accessible. Marriage records are particularly useful. Church records are generally more comprehensive.
If you don't know a precise location, but your ancestor recorded a birth, death or marriage in Ireland after 1863, you should start with state records of births, marriages and deaths (Chapter 2). The relevant entry in these records will give you a precise location. With this you will then be able to use the 1901 and 1911 census returns (Chapter 3), the relevant church records (Chapter 4), and all the records relating to the locality.
If you cannot find a relevant entry in state records -all too possible -what you do next depends on the circumstances:
If you know a death took place in Ireland, the post-1858 Calendars of Wills and Administrations might give you a location.
If you know your ancestor's occupation in Ireland, occupational sources might supply a location (Chapter 7).
If you have a precise date of emigration, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century, passenger and immigration lists might supply a location of origin.
If you know none of these, you can check surname distribution in Ireland to give you some idea of where in Ireland the surname was most common and start work on the records for this area (Chapter 5). However the chances of success are very slim.
If your ancestor emigrated, it is probably more advisable to work on the records in the country of immigration.
If your ancestor was not born, did not die, or get married in Ireland after 1863, were any of your ancestor's brothers and sisters or other relations born, or did they get married, or die in Ireland after 1863?
If the answer is yes, you should concentrate for the moment on locating these people in the records. The location information you uncover will lead you to your ancestor (see page 20).
If the answer is no, was your ancestor (or any of his or her siblings) a non-Roman Catholic who married in Ireland after 1844?
If yes, all marriages except those between Catholics are registered from 1845. If you can identify the relevant entry, it will provide details of the preceding generation as well as a location and occupation (Chapter 2). From here local church records, occupational records and records relating to the locality are available.
If no, do you know a precise location in Ireland?
If the answer is yes, local church records are the best direct source of family information. To identify the relevant church or parish, you first need to know the civil parish. You can find this from the Townlands Index (Chapter 5). The civil parish is also necessary to use land records and other records relating to locality. It may also be an idea to commission a heritage centre to search its database, if it has completed computerising church records for the county.
If you know the county, you will still have to identify the precise area, generally a townland or civil parish.
If you have some idea of the placename but don't know where it is in the county, check the Townlands Index. If the surname is unusual enough, you may be able to narrow down the potentially relevant areas using a count of householders or the Index of Surnames. You could also use the full name index to Griffith's Valuation (Chapter 5).
If your ancestor lived in Ireland before the nineteenth century, then:
If he or she was a member of the property- owning classes, there is a good chance you will find something in records of wills, the Registry of Deeds, the Genealogical Office or in newspapers.
If he or she was not a member of the property- owning classes, check local county source lists, especially for estate records, census substitutes and gravestone inscriptions. However you are crossing the boundary between genealogy and local history and your chances of finding information are not good.
Your ancestor was not born, did not marry, and did not die in Ireland after 1863 and you don't know where in Ireland he or she came from.
You will have to find a location. How you do this depends on what else you know:
If you have some idea of the placename but cannot locate it in Ireland, check the Townlands Index.
If all you know is the name of the individual, then (unless the surname is very unusual) you will have to find the location of origin in some other way.
If you also know the surname of your ancestor's spouse or other relatives, it may be possible to narrow down the areas in which both surnames occur in the early nineteenth century using count of householders or the Index of Surnames or the Griffith's CD index. Again, this depends on how common the surnames were.
If your ancestor had an occupation in Ireland other than tenant farmer, trade directories and occupational records might provide a location.
If you know when your ancestor emigrated and where to, passenger and immigration lists and material on the Irish abroad may provide at least a county of origin.