Irish Roots »

• Will Calendars

  May 13, 2013 @ 8:42 am | by John Grenham

  Irish wills are fiddly to research, all the fiddlier for not being there, since most of them were destroyed in 1922. Before the state took over the administration of probate in 1858, the Church of Ireland as the state church had responsibility for wills and intestacies and did a very mixed job, to say the least. Whatever records and wills they had gathered were eventually passed to the old, doomed Public Record Office of Ireland. So the chances of finding something useful before 1858 are generally slim.

  After 1858, things are very different. Wills are instruments for transmission of that most revered of Victorian sacred cows, private property, and to ensure the process was thoroughly free of hanky-panky the records had to be as public as possible. A system was developed of annual, alphabetical, printed finding aids, known as ‘calendars’, with each entry containing an outline of the will or intestacy. Which means that for every single will or intestacy after 1857 there is at least that detailed summary.

  These Calendars are large folio-sized volumes, cumbersome but easy to search physically, if you happen to be in the National Archives Reading Room. Otherwise, the options have been to yearn from afar or to struggle with the Mormon microfilms. Yearn and struggle no more. The National Archives have digitised the whole lot, free, at genealogy.nationalarchives.ie.

  As is now NAI style, the search interface is plain vanilla, eschewing such fripperies as surname variants and previous/next buttons. A plain introduction gives the background, specifies precisely what’s present, what’s missing and why, and then links search results to pdf copies of the originals (except for 1919 and 1920, for some reason).

  Yet again, the Archives have brought another vital part of our past into sharper focus, and on a shoestring. Ten out of ten.

• Follow the family farm

  May 6, 2013 @ 11:46 am | by John Grenham

  The Macra na Feirme publication “Land Mobility and Succession in Ireland” (a good bedtime read, available at tinyurl.com/ca7rfyn) reports that in 2011 a mere 0.3% of agricultural land in Ireland was put on the open market. It is an extraordinary figure. In effect, there is no buying or selling of farms in this country. Elsewhere in the developed world, most agricultural land is part of the normal workings of capitalism: invest capital to produce food to make a return on capital. Not in Ireland.

  The historic reason lies in the colossal transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants that happened over the century from 1870. The biggest single change came in 1903, with the Wyndham Land Act, which made land transfer very attractive for both sides. The government paid the difference between the landlord’s asking price and the tenant’s offer and then lent the purchase price to the tenant. The new loan repayments were so close to the old annual rent that, for little or no difference in outlay, you went from being a tenant to being an owner. It was an offer almost no-one could refuse.

  After generations of tenancy, the sweetness of that ownership created a ferocious attachment to the land, making it unthinkable that it could ever be simply sold off. Nearly all transfers had to take place within the extended family.

  Which makes it possible to trace extended families in rural Ireland by following their property.

  The Valuation Office records all changes to the holdings first surveyed by Griffith in the mid-nineteenth century and they remained the basis for local property taxes (“The Rates”) until abolition in 1977. Anyone in occupation then (and now) is overwhelmingly likely to be related to the original purchaser. Second or third cousins twice removed, perhaps, but related. The revision books and maps are open to the public at the Office premises in the Irish Life Centre in Dublin, with excellent guidance provided by the staff. See valoff.ie.

• Events explosion

  April 29, 2013 @ 11:46 am | by John Grenham

  The very late spring has produced explosions of green growth everywhere. And the events season – conferences, meetings, commemorations – has also arrived with a bang.

  Among the most recent additions to the calendar is the National Famine Commemoration. First held only four years ago, it is staged on a Sunday in May in each province in rotation – this year’s is to be held in Kilrush on May 12th next. The event is not just a single ceremony, however. For a full ten days starting from May 3rd, an extraordinary series of talks, concerts, films, guided walks and re-enactments bears witness to the devastating impact of the Famine in south-west Clare. Details are at faminecommemoration2013.ie. One of the organisers, Paddy Waldron, has put together an excellent online guide to relevant genealogical and local history records at tinyurl.com/c55yt9z.

  Another recently-born, equally remarkable event is the 5th Summer Conference of the Sligo Field Club, “A Celebration of Sligo Families”, being held in Sligo on from May 10th to 12th. What’s so remarkable? The line-up of speakers positively glows: Jim Mallory, Ken Nicholls, Nollaig Ó Muraíle, Gerard Moran, Tom Bartlett, Catríona Crowe … Awaiting you is weekend of rare, detailed (and witty) talk on Sligo families, particularly from the seventeenth century. See facebook.com/TheSligoFieldClub.

  If neither of these suit you, take a meander through The Gathering website, thegatheringireland.com. For next weekend alone, it lists more than 100 events. The variety is bewildering, ranging from the Dún Laoghaire festival of flags and emblems through the Maguire history weekend in Enniskillen to the Lorteo class of ’78 reunion in Mullingar.

  If you extend your range to a month, the number of events grows into thousands and the diversity gets positively surreal: The Ballinacoola Murphy Clan, PJ’s 70th Birthday Bash and, my favourite, “Come Back Morgan” self-described as ” one big fat excuse for you to come back to visit us this Summer!” Front up, Morgan.

  We may be broke, but at least we’re not staying at home brooding about it.

• Graveyards worth whistling past

  April 21, 2013 @ 3:13 pm | by John Grenham

  Genealogy deals with the dead, so it’s not surprising that graveyards loom large in researchers’ minds, and have done for 150 years.

  Since the mid-2000s, however, technology has brought about a sea-change in the kind of access we have to graveyards and headstones. No fewer than three Irish companies are offering graveyard survey services, recording the precise position of each grave using GPS, transcribing inscriptions, taking digital photographs, producing cemetery maps and making the whole lot freely available online.

  The oldest is Irish Graveyard Surveyors, at irishgraveyards.ie. Set up in 2007 by Michael Durkan, the son of a Mayo undertaker, it aims to preserve the kind of detailed knowledge of local graveyards that his father had. So far, almost 200 cemeteries are covered, mainly in the West, with the majority in Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Donegal and Clare. For each location the cemetery owner gets maps, along with transcripts and photographs for every headstone, from the most recent to the oldest. And so do we, on their free website.

  The most direct competitor is discovereverafter.com, based in Northern Ireland, but also starting to operate in the South, and online only since 2012. The site doesn’t have a large-scale map showing the locations covered, making it a little awkward to work out precisely what they’ve done, but there appear to be around 100 graveyards included, mostly in Northern Ireland and heavily concentrated in Co. Derry. Again, the survey results – photos, transcripts and maps – are all freely searchable online.

  The third of the trio, historicgraves.com, is not a business in the same way as the other two. It relies on volunteer-led local groups, provides them with technical and archaeological know-how and publishes the results online. Not all surveyed graveyards include a full set of transcriptions, but the quality of what is there is very good and, again, free. The main focus of work is in the south and south-west, Tipperary, Limerick, Waterford and Cork in particular.

• Tom Cruise’s Glorious Otherness

  April 14, 2013 @ 12:42 pm | by John Grenham

  Thirty years ago, I travelled in India for a while. Among my most vivid memories is something that happened in the middle of the indescribable chaos of a railway ticket office. A small boy aged about ten, filthy and dressed in rags, started staring at me through the crowd. When I began to stare back, he didn’t drop his gaze, didn’t change his utterly blank expression. Shivers started to run down the back of my neck. It felt as if he didn’t recognize me as a fellow human being, as if the very notion of common humanity didn’t exist for him. At the other end of the Indian social scale, a journey on an air-conditioned sleeper provided a less eerie version of the same experience. The middle-class Indians sharing their compartment with a couple of rancid, heat-stunned Irish blithely ignored us. There was no question of hostility, just absolute indifference. It took a while, but eventually I came to see that what was happening in both cases was true tolerance, unreserved acceptance of difference, without any need to make it familiar, or even welcome.

  Ireland certainly inhabits the other end of the spectrum. We’re not nearly as intolerant as some anti-racism campaigners would have us believe, but accepting otherness is not something we do easily. Watch Irish people meeting for the first time abroad and you’ll see long, tortuous explorations of how precisely they have to be connected. Absence of connection is not an option. Our brand of tolerance to foreigners is similar, the kind of hospitality that invites the outsider to become one of us.

  And the most extreme version of this goes: “Now you just make yourself comfortable there, while I get the genealogist to fit you into the family.”

  Personally, I would prefer just to be able to tolerate Tom Cruise, in all his glorious otherness.

• You and me and Kim Jong-Un

  April 6, 2013 @ 12:20 pm | by John Grenham

  Most people have very limited horizons when they think about their ancestors. It is hard to feel a direct personal connection with anyone more remote than a great-grandparent. Eyes glaze over when you try to tell people of earlier generations, and one good reason is that the numbers inflate so rapidly, to the point of disbelief. How can you possibly have almost 33,000 direct ancestors just five centuries back? (The answer, of course, is that you can’t: think cousin marriage. Then think of something else.)

  But when you lift your eyes to the geological timescale things start to get really peculiar. A simple, striking, scientific fact is that every single life-form so far examined shares the same ancestor. You, me, Kim Jong-Un, bacteria, jellyfish, dinosaurs, mushrooms, slime mould and grass all descend from a single, original, living being. It has even acquired its own acronym: LUCA, short for Last Universal Common Ancestor. Current theory posits it as a small, single-cell organism, estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

  One of the implications is that the beginning of life on earth seems to have been a unique event in the 4.2 billion-year history of the planet. Understandably, this makes many scientists squeamish – such an event is so vanishingly unlikely it begins to look like evidence for some kind of outside intervention, and legions of microbiologists are busy positing alternatives – unfound alien lines, multiple lines that were outcompeted by ours, cross-species sharing of genetic material. But the strongest evidence is still for a single, unique origin, as Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, “some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed”.

  Hence my favourite of the many excuses for unsuccessful genealogical research: we’re all brothers anyway, man. Or at least 500th cousins.

• A New Portal

  April 1, 2013 @ 1:42 pm | by John Grenham

  For years tourism authorities in this country have been tearing their hair out over the problems of using genealogy as a marketing tool. What’s needed is blindingly obvious: make it as easy as possible for descendants of emigrants to find records of their ancestors. A significant proportion will have their holiday choices at least influenced by easy success. QED.

  The main obstacle is no longer the lack of online records (although there remain some shameful exceptions – General Register Office, I’m looking at you). The obstacle is now fragmentation. One site has some of the church records, but won’t link to that other site with the rest of them and that other site won’t link to the site with the census records and yet another site … and around and around we go.

  Some common sense has finally prevailed. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has revamped their site, irishgenealogy.ie, and turned it into a portal that creates simple-to-follow, ready-made searches for all the relevant free sites at the click of a single button. It is perfect for someone with just a casual interest in their Irish past – they get an instant uncomplicated overview of almost everything they might need to search.

  For the sake of transparency, I should add that I provided some of the text and ran some of the testing. So I have to bite the hand. The site is by no means perfect. Its usefulness as a portal for beginners and casual users depends on it being complete, but there are no ready-made searches for any commercial sites, or indeed familysearch.org, and these are essential. But I’m sure they will come.

  The best way to see the revamp is as a start: the portal provides the outline of a great reception area. So tourist bosses can begin to leave their hair in place, but they need to start herding visitors into that area.

• Seán Murphy

  March 25, 2013 @ 9:31 am | by John Grenham

  Seán Murphy is one of the unsung heroes of Irish genealogy. An academic historian by training, he has worked as a professional genealogist for more than thirty years and has published widely in journals and magazines. Among his longer publications are The Twilight of the Chiefs: The MacCarthy Mor Hoax (Academica, 2001) and his annual Directory of Irish Genealogy (available free online at bit.ly/ZZXPuu).

  He is best known for the courses he gives as part of the Adult Education Programme of University College Dublin (see bit.ly/13etezw). At their simplest, these provide introductory classes to people who want to research their own family. However, Seán has also expanded and developed them to the point where it is possible to take a three-year course leading to a Certificate in Genealogy/Family History, an NUI qualification graded at NFQ level 7, the equivalent of an ordinary level Bachelor degree. The standards and principles inculcated in his students are high and enduring. Graduates of the course stay in contact, through a “Certificate Genealogists’ Alumni Group” (cigo.ie/constituents_ccag.html).

  There are reasons why Sean is unsung: suffering fools gladly does not figure among his talents. The scepticism and academic rigour he applies relentlessly in his work can sometimes make it seem that he is actively searching for toes to tread on, and he has few friends in Irish genealogical circles (or cliques, as he might see them). But he has done deep and valuable service to research standards in this country.

  At 11 am on Saturday April 27th next, you can see Seán in action giving a talk on “Recent Developments in Irish Genealogy” at the National Library of Ireland. The event is free but voluntary contributions will be requested to the Cystic Fibrosis Hopesource Foundation. Registration is recommended: contact maevemullin@gmail.com

• Dublin city voters, 1908

  March 20, 2013 @ 11:34 am | by John Grenham

  The laws of Irish decorum dictate that one apologise for blowing one’s own trumpet. But, frankly, my own trumpet is one of my very favourite instruments. My long-suffering neighbours can testify to the loud, self-satisfied tootling that often keeps them awake long into the night.

  Today’s tune concerns the new database on Dublin City Library and Archive’s site dublinheritage.ie, covering Dublin voters in 1908. It has its origins in the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898, which transformed the laws governing local elections in Ireland, and massively widened the franchise. Whereas before only freemen and the propertied could vote in local elections, after 1898 “occupiers, inhabitants and lodgers” were also included, as well as women over the age of 30. To give some idea of the scale of change, in 1908 96% of voters listed were from these new categories. They cover almost the entire social spectrum, from Robert Beresford Smyth, a large freeholder in D’Olier St., recorded as “travelling abroad” in 1908, to Edward Kane, a lodger paying 4s a week for two unfurnished rooms on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. This is Joyce’s Dublin, top to bottom. The number of voters recorded is 46,065. The population of the city in 1901 was 290,638. Given the age qualifications – 21 for men, 30 for women – the records probably cover a large majority of households in the city.

  The annual original volumes are giant backbreakers, divided by electoral ward, in turn sub-divided by voter category, then listing electors house by house. In other words, searching for an individual meant having to comb the entire volume. If you could lift it. Creating a database transcript with record images utterly transforms the records’ usefulness.

  To be honest, however satisfying the end result, my role was as just one of a team made up of DCLA staff, in particular Dr. Mary Clark, the City Archivist. Full credit to them and just a little tootle for me.

• Family History Year

  March 10, 2013 @ 12:00 pm | by John Grenham

  In the build-up to St. Patrick’s Day, Tourism Ireland recently christened 2013 “Family History Year”. To the grizzled veterans among us, for whom every year is another (bloody) Family History Year, this might seem less than startling. But some interesting things are emerging. The first act of the Year was to set up a dedicated Facebook page in mid-February, facebook.com/IrelandFamilyHistory, with an aim of reaching 50,000 followers by the end of 2013. After a month they’ve already reached 10,000.

  Keeping an eye on the page as it updates is fascinating, if a little scary. Wave after wave of people announce their irishnesss and give a few details of their ancestry. As a professional, I feel a bit like a mother bird watching a nest fill with thousands of little chicks screeching to be fed. The first impulse is just to run away.

  But the site’s success demonstrates more powerfully than any market survey ever could just how tenacious identification with Ireland remains among the 80 million. Making it as easy as possible for them to find the records of their ancestors should be one of the main concerns of our public administration, and not just because they might give us a few bob, but because we owe it to them, and to their and our ancestors. Even if a sizeable proportion will remain poor lost souls, no matter how much help they get: “My grandfather’s name was Ryan. He came from Tipperary.” Well, yes.

  A valiant attempt to unlose some of them takes place at The St Patrick’s Festival Irish Family History Centre in the Discover Ireland centre in the old St. Andrew’s church in Suffolk St. in Dublin from March 14th to 18th next. Run by Eneclann and FindMyPast, and with six other groups participating, the Centre is designed unapologetically for beginners, with a rolling programme of talks every day and free on-site access to FindMyPast’s records. More information is at bit.ly/XXVrCJ.

  The Centre also offers personal advice from experts who won’t run away.

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