Are you trying to find your Irish roots?

I don’t mean your dark, blonde, or gray roots; I’m talking your Hibernian or Celtic roots.  Well, let me share with you some on-line resources to help you.  Many are free.  The ones I’ve listed below that are not, I have annotated as such.  Site such as Ancestry.com of course, are not free and you do need to have some idea where your ancestors, Irish or not, came from and ideas of dates and areas of birth and/or residence to make progress, but they can be very helpful if you can spend the money and might be a good kick starter place.  You can keep the information once you leave the site after your subscription ends. 

Good look with your search.  Check back with me in the future for how to find your Mexican and Hispanic roots as that is my next venture.

 

1:            Ask About Ireland           Griffith’s Valuation – A free searchable database of tenants and landowners in Ireland from 1848-1858.  A great resource.     http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/

2:            Irish Geneolgy.ie             This just came on-line and is free.  I haven’t used it much yet, so can’t vouch for accuracy as yet or usefulness.    http://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/news/46-indexes-of-the-civil-registers-now-launched

2:            Family search.org            This is actually another search site of the Latter Day Saints, who do the Ancestry Site, but it is free, but it has different records…oddly, and it has free family tree software and an option…if you chose to upload your own family research for other people to compare their records to.   https://familysearch.org

3:            National Archives, census of Ireland      Now has records, earlier ones more limited, for the years 1821, 1831, 1841, 1851, 1901, and 1911.  The earlier records are very limited, but helpful.

4:            From Ireland.net             Free Irish records search   Has sections on different counties, plus one large one on Dublin; sections on civil records and gravestones, etc.                    http://www.from-ireland.net/ 

6:            Find my Past                                                      http://www.findmypast.com/

7.            Bob’s genealogy webpage  Free record search http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hiflyte/index.htm

8.            The Landed Estates Web site    A free searchable, online database of all Landed Estates in Connacht and Munster, maintained by the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway.

http://www.landedestates.ie/ 

 

9.            Rootsweb Guide to Irish Genealogy            A guide to Irish genealogical research is a project of the Fianna Study Group for Irish Genealogy and was begun as a study project for  Genealogy Course #33 at Virtual University for the fall 1997 term, and is being added to constantly.  Searches are free.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fianna/

10.          Ellis Island Web site       Free search of emigrant arrivals                                http://www.ellisisland.org/

11.          Failteromhat     General free Irish search resource with varied banks of information including lists of Irish flax growers and their home regions, land owners in 1876, and multiple trade directories

http://www.failteromhat.com/

 

12.          United States Government         family research and genealogy research website

http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/History-Family.shtml

13.          The National Archives   US Government on-line searchable database includes United States Census records, military records, etc.                                                                                                                       http://www.archives.gov/

14.          Compilation of Genealogy Search Links for Irish Counties            http://www.censusfinder.com/ireland.htm

15.          Ireland’s history in maps              Ancient maps of Ireland’s topography and counties

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlkik/ihm/iremaps.htm

16.          Roots Ireland     Lots of information and links, but searches aren’t free; take a look anyway for yourself.  Great if you need help with things like Irish naming conventions, pet names and translations and/or are looking for official records and need the on-line links to go to.         https://www.rootsireland.ie/index.php?id=29

 

17.          Leitrim Roscommon Genealogy Page     Free searchable on-line search site with links for other Irish and American websites for family searches

  http://www.leitrim-roscommon.com/index.shtml

 

18.          My Naughton Family line in Ireland        A webpage built by Bill Naughton, who was researching his own family roots in Ireland.  He gives a wonderful history of the Naughton family/ancient tribes in Ireland back to ancient times and illustrates how he went back several generations to find his routes.  A very helpful man.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~naughton/mynaughtons0808.html

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~naughton/

19.          The National Library of Ireland                  http://www.nli.ie/

20.          Irish Genealogy Toolkit                                 http://www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/Roman-Catholic-baptism.html

21.          Genealogy Forum                                           http://genforum.genealogy.com/

22.          The Irish Times                 http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/browse/counties/civilmaps/

23.          Irish Heritage Links http://www.courts.ie/Courts.ie/Library3.nsf/pagecurrent/E62E7463D524ACC980256DF800499204

24           Ireland Genealogy Projects Online                          http://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/index.htm#gsc.tab=0

25.          Cyndi’s List         Free Genealogy Link List                http://www.cyndislist.com/

26.          Genebase                                                                           http://www.genebase.com

Ancestry.com

I have an account on ancestry.com.  I hadn’t planned to renew, but missed the date when my current subscription expired and thought I was good for another month.  They renewed it for me!  I didn’t realize they do this automatically.  I will not be renewing again.  Today the site has been down all day long. 

At least twice a week, it goes down or gets tangled up in the midst of using it, for no reason at all.  This isn’t due to my browser, I’ve used different browsers.  I have contacted them in the past and tried contacting what I thought was their customer resource section and never got a response.

On television, the commercials make it sound, well, a happy person says, “Just type in a name and my family came up!”  Please, not so much. 

You actually do have to have some basic information, the more the better, like name, dates and/or estimates for births, locations and other associated relatives to find connections.  I was lucky enough to know the area where my ancestors are from overseas and to have inherited basic genealogical information.  Even so, I used census and information from many other sites to help me build the tree I do have now in Ancestry. 

In Ancestry, I will get those infamous leaves (you’ve seen them in the television commercials) popping up during the most inscrutable times.  For example, I will have put in John Doe, born 1897 in Fairfield, Virginia as an ancestor and will get countless hints about other John Does, born in the 1800s, in Fairfield, Virginia…or in England or a Doe Franklin born in 1987 from Vicksburg as a suggested match! 

Ancestry has no way for you to search using combined information from two or three people to get a better match, so it is rather tedious. 

Spelling is funny and records are missing that are available on their “sister” free site, Family Search. Org.   

When you put in search criteria for spelling that is phonetically similar, you may get someone with the name Becky Johnson coming back when you are looking for Benson James.  If I am looking for a particular name, and indicate I want that exact match, it will include other similarly named people, if they happen to be, let’s say, one of the witnesses, even if their date of birth isn’t displayed and they aren’t the subject of the record.  So instead of getting 150 Becky Johnsons, you get 1000, because you will also get any person born, who happened to have someone stand up for them who had a name that was somewhat similar to Becky Johnson, like Beacon Jackson.

The records themselves are limited giving basic information, i.e. in a marriage record, the names of a groom and several possible brides, unless you are looking at a church record.  Birth records show the place where the birth is registered, in for example Ireland, not where the person was actually born, and not the date they were born as births were registered quarterly since the mid 1800’s.  A person could be born May 2nd and perhaps the parent or an uncle reported it that month  (or next), but maybe it wasn’t registered in the official records till the next quarter, so your birth date comes up something like July-September, and the year. 

Some records are shown to be available, but only if you access them through Fold 3, which you must sign up for and pay for.  Census records you can get online for free yourself with much more information than you get on ancestry.  One of the few valuable assets of ancestry is possibly bumping into other people researching your ancestors and meeting new relatives.  It did happen to me, so for that I am grateful

It is very annoying though to experience a lack of accessibility to this site for which I am paying well for.  You would think they would credit their “dues paying members” but they don’t. 

Hey Ancestry, get user friendly, will you?  People are talking and they’re not dead.