Irish Roots »

• Swimmers or spellers?

  August 12, 2012 @ 12:40 pm | by John Grenham

  The marketing of genetic genealogy means that it needs to be approached with deep scepticism. It is far too easy to pay $200, have yourself pronounced 38% Viking, and get a (free!) plastic Viking helmet. Only one kind of test is unambiguously useful: a yDNA test of any group of men can establish with a high degree of precision when their most recent common ancestor lived. The most obvious use for this is in surname studies: a group of unrelated men with the same surname, particularly an unusual surname, can find out if they are all descended from a common ancestor, or whether their surname arose independently in different areas.

  Wait a second. Grenham is a rare enough surname. In Ireland it is restricted to a very precise area in south Roscommon. And it also exists as a surname in the south-east of England – there’s even a “Grenham Bay” in Kent. So are we descended from a stray English soldier who went native in eighteenth-century Athlone? (We’re quite native, you know.) Or, did the family come from across the river in Offaly, started by a Grennan who was a good swimmer but a poor speller?

  For a long time I’ve liked the uncertainty. It’s a good representative of the deep ambiguity that lies at the root of many surnames in Ireland. But a yDNA project can completely remove that uncertainty. Comparing yDNA from Grenham males with roots in Roscommon and those from Kent can objectively identify when our most recent common ancestor lived. If it was some time in the last four centuries, we probably need to start searching early British military records. Otherwise, we should embrace our trans-Shannon cousins.

  The problem, as always, is that someone has to take responsibility for such a project. I think I just nominated myself.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The Ombudsman and the GRO

  August 7, 2012 @ 9:10 am | by John Grenham

  Last week the Ombudsman published ‘Hidden History? – The Law, The Archives and the General Register Office’ (available in full at ombudsman.gov.ie), an investigation into problems with access to historic GRO records. It was prompted by a complaint from a local historian. He had been painstakingly working his way through the copies of the nineteenth-century death registers held by his local Superintendent Registrar, noting the occupation recorded in each record. The aim was to reconstruct the history of employment in his area in the finest detail possible, an impressive and very valuable project. Then, in 2007, he was informed that he could no longer see the registers. Under the 2004 Civil Registration Act, his statutory right of access had been revoked and now he could only use the records via the indexes in the Research Room in Dublin. In effect, what had previously been free would now cost thousands, be much less precise, and take years rather than months.

  Not surprisingly, the report fully upholds his complaint, but it also goes much further, finding that historic GRO registers are covered by the 1986 National Archives Act and that there is thus an obligation to make them available for public inspection. The entire report, from its dissection of the public administration issues to the minutiae of the legal situation, is a masterpiece of clarity, sound reasoning and common sense, and the Office is to be congratulated, as are those who made the submissions used in its preparation, in particular the Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland.

  So, will the GRO implement the report’s recommendations? The response of the Registrar-General to the Ombudsman’s findings, reproduced in full in Appendix 4, provides a strong clue. It is a minor masterpiece of Sir Humprhyology. A succession of carefully-crafted paragraphs lead to the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion. Which is, of course, that nothing can be done.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The Genealogist’s Internet

  July 29, 2012 @ 12:40 pm | by John Grenham

  I was first bowled over by Peter Christian’s The Genealogist’s Internet eight years ago, when the second edition came out. At the time, genealogy was sprouting websites like a thousand-headed hydra, provoking the strong temptation to just give up, lie down and weep. But Peter girded his loins and set about creating deeply rational categories and subcategories in which every single site could make sense. And then he listed them all. The book brought light where there was darkness.

  The only pity was that its focus was so strongly on England, Scotland and Wales, with anything relating to Ireland a bit of an afterthought. But at that point there was so little of Irish interest online that such brevity was natural. The fifth edition of the book came out in May this year and the treatment of Ireland is vastly expanded, although (thank God) still not perfect: it misses the FamilySearch transcripts of Irish civil birth records to 1881, and the National Archives advanced census search and online will calendars, among others.

  But every time I open it, I still find something I should have known but didn’t: the number of local electoral records in the National Library, the Irish county maps on londonancestor.com, the version of the 1851 Townlands Index at irish-place-names.com … The list grows every day. An added pleasure is the quality of the observations on the various sites and topics. The tone ranges from crisp to trenchant. It can safely be said that suffering fools gladly does not figure among Peter’s pastimes.

  Especially in the light of our growing understanding of the overlap between Irish and British records, the book is absolutely essential for anyone interested in genealogy or local history in Ireland. Full publication and purchasing details are at spub.co.uk, where there is also a selection of links to most of the resources covered.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• A high chiefs-to-Indians ratio

  July 23, 2012 @ 9:12 am | by John Grenham

  The lure of blue blood is a perennial hazard in genealogy, and by no means confined to Ireland. Witness the “Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States Of America” (charlemagne.org) or indeed the Confucius Genealogy, claiming to go back more than 2,500 years and supposedly listing more than two million of his living descendants (tinyurl.ie/a4w).

  The basic mechanism is simple: someone looks into their heart and sees innate nobility, then looks around at their daily life and sees very little nobility indeed. The mismatch can only be accounted for by a mistake, a forgotten blood link to the truly noble. For most people, this is a grown-up version of an eight-year-old girl’s Princess fantasy, but it can still be powerful enough to warp all logic and common sense.

  In Ireland, the affliction usually involves a half-remembered family tradition – “my granduncle’s brother-in-law’s neighbour told me …” – or simple geographical proximity. Your ancestors were called Kelly, and came from South Roscommon, so they must be descended from the O’Kellys of Uí Máine. If you can just stretch your own family history back five generations and stretch the O’Kellys forward another five … Dealing with stuff like this sets any experienced researcher’s hair on end: you just can’t know the answer before you start the research.

  A classic jibe of Victorian Ireland against the Gael was that every dirt-poor Irish tenant claimed to be a descendant of the old Gaelic aristocracy. The irony is that there was probably more truth to the claim than Victorian superciliousness could allow. Medieval Ireland had an extremely high chiefs-to-Indians ratio, so there were enough nobles to guarantee that pretty much everyone had (and has) kings and princes in their family tree. It’s just impossible to prove. That warm glow of innate nobility will have to suffice. And don’t forget that the tree still has a lot more Indians than chiefs.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Ancestry.com in Dublin

  July 16, 2012 @ 12:15 pm | by John Grenham

  The news that Ancestry.com is to create a permanent HQ for its international business in Dublin with the creation of up to fifty jobs is obviously very welcome (my CV is very easy to track down, I should point out). But it is unlikely to make much difference to researchers whose focus is Irish records, at least in the short term. Any immediate effect will, I think, be indirect. The sheer clout and business credibility of a multinational family history corporation might just bump genealogy back onto the government agenda, whence it has recently seemed to disappear.

  In the medium term, though, the presence of a significant part of its operations in Ireland, supported by Enterprise Ireland, could open doors to digitisation projects that are currently completely unaffordable, indeed unthinkable, for the Irish state. The shopping list is mouth-watering: General Register Office, Registry of Deeds, Valuation Office, estate papers … Outside Ireland, Ancestry is well-practised in doing deals with state agencies for the digital rights to records. The real question is whether they’ll be bothered here.

  Let me explain. Any Irish records currently carried by the company appear as part of the “UK and Ireland collection” on ancestry.co.uk, the UK ancestry site. This is run by Ancestry.com Europe S.à rl, a limited company based in Luxembourg that also manages six other non-US Ancestry websites, for Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Australia and, strangely, Canada. These are the businesses that will now be supervised from Dublin. So Irish records are only a sub-division of a sub-section of the international wing of the business to be managed from here. In other words, a very small part of a very big operation.

  Of course, Irish records have a disproportionate value for US researchers, but the HQ of the US company remains Provo, Utah. We can only hope that joined-up thinking prevails over corporate demarcations.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The neighbours are better at this than us

  July 8, 2012 @ 1:25 pm | by John Grenham

  Some good news. The General Register Office of Northern Ireland has begun the process of making its historic records searchable online, with a launch date some time before the end of 2013. (You can see the full tender document at tinyurl.ie/a16).

  It’s worth spelling out what exactly GRONI intends, if only to embarrass our own General Register Office. The site will have fully searchable transcripts linked to images of:

  • all birth records older than 100 years, covering 1864-1913;
  • all marriage records older than 75 years, covering 1845 to 1937;
  • and all deaths older than 50 years, covering 1864 to 1962.

  Not coincidentally, these are the precise cut-off points already used by the Scottish General Register Office’s online service at scotlandspeople.gov.uk. It means that, like the Scots, GRONI is committed to adding an additional year’s records to the online service every year. More recent records will be searchable just as transparently, but only onsite at GRONI’s search room in Belfast.

  The website will be pay-per-view, almost certainly also on the model of scotlandspeople, and there has to be some trepidation about potential prices, given the stiff fees currently charged for research and certificates at GRONI. But if the searches are as precise as the prototype currently on offer in the search room, they will have many, many customers. The biggest loser is likely to be the most profitable Irish genealogy website, rootsireland.ie. Three of its four Northern Irish centres offer some pay-per-view transcripts of registration records, albeit without images.

  Before 1922, registration districts simply ignored county boundaries. So GRONI’s pre-1922 records cover parts of what later became the Republic . If your ancestors lived in the right part of Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan or Louth, the new site will remove the Victorian shackles our own GRO imposes on researchers.

  Put to shame by the neighbours, yet again.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Why can’t we all just get along?

  July 2, 2012 @ 9:40 am | by John Grenham

  I recently had a long conversation with a veteran member of the Irish Family History Foundation, the umbrella group for the heritage centres behind the biggest Irish genealogy website, rootsireland.ie. The sense of outrage and persecution felt by IFHF members is extraordinary. It is largely directed at the Irish public service –civil servants, National Archives, National Library and others. And I had to tell him that, as far as I knew, the feelings were reciprocated, and just as intensely.

  The situation reminds me of nothing so much as a very bad marriage breakup, with each side blaming the other and pouring out tales of monstrous injustice to long-suffering friends. And like a marriage breakup, two simple facts have to be accepted by each side for the situation to change. First, what’s done is done. Nobody has a monopoly on truth or grievance. Or, indeed, genealogical records. And second, without some cooperation, however arms-length, everyone suffers, particularly the innocent. Which is to say, ordinary researchers.

  There is no shortage of areas where some collaboration could sow the seeds of tolerance. For example, the IFHF could use some of its surplus to help digitise the records of National schools, or the Valuation Office, or the Registry of Deeds. But one area stands out. The IFHF centres have no images of the church records they have transcribed. And they are currently lobbying hard to stop the National Library making digital images of Catholic parish register microfilms available online. So the centres have transcripts but no images, the Library has images but no transcripts, and researchers are stuck with the dilemma of putting blind faith in the accuracy of the transcripts or manually combing through years of images. A compromise is hardly rocket science.

  In the immortal words of Helen Lovejoy, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Counting the gift horse’s teeth

  June 24, 2012 @ 12:18 pm | by John Grenham

  The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland opened its new premises in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast a little over a year ago, to gasps of awe and envy. But a recent visit left me feeling uneasy.

  The first issue is its location. The Titanic Quarter consists of a few giant, “landmark” buildings sitting in the levelled wasteland of what used to be Belfast Docks. PRONI’s move here was part of a colossal property development scheme that will now never be completed. The interior of the building reflects its origins. Property Developer chic dominates, with a giant faceless atrium more suited to an airport than an archives, hotel-style swipe-card access through every door, no expense spared and very little humanity anywhere.

  But the biggest problem is the disproportion in the readers’ facilities. Crammed into one end of the Search Room are twenty or so microfilm readers, almost all continuously in use for parish registers or newspapers, while the remainder of the space is occupied by a football field of 50 spanking new and completely unused PCs. The Reading Room, where actual documents are read, is huge. There is space for 80 readers, but it is never actually used by more than four or five at a time. The electronic document ordering system is as complex as air-traffic control, forcing users into convoluted processes whose main aim seems to be to cut out any human contact.

  The whole thing feels like a bureaucrat’s dream, the product of many, many planning-subcommittee meetings fuelled by vast amounts of public money. God knows it has its own problems, but with a quarter the space and one tenth the staff, the National Archives in Bishop Street is actually a much more pleasant space to do research in.

  And if you’re wondering why I’m so sour … No, I didn’t find the families I was looking for.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• Surname maps

  June 18, 2012 @ 9:08 am | by John Grenham

  As anyone who has suffered through a bad Powerpoint presentation can testify, there is a world of difference between written information and visual information. Pictures trigger an immediate reflex response: seeing a shark-fin coming towards you means a lot more than reading the word “Shark”.

  I have recently discovered just how much more powerful pictures can be. The revamp in May of the Irish Ancestors site (irishtimes.com/ancestor) added a new service, individual surname maps. These maps are quite simple – they count every householder of a particular surname recorded in Griffith’s Valuation (1847 to 1864) and plot the numbers, parish by parish, onto a map of Ireland.

  None of the information is new – it has been widely available in one shape or another for more than thirty years. But the impact of seeing geographic patterns emerge on the maps is extraordinary. Here are the 900 or so Redmond households, spreading out from the Norman invasion site over 20 or more generations (tinyurl.ie/9v8). Here are the Harkins, with a thick ribbon of settlement running along the north Donegal coastline (tinyurl.ie/9vt). If there was ever any doubt that the surname McMahon originated in two distinct areas, Clare and Monaghan, just look at the Griffith’s household map (tinyurl.ie/9va).

  The problem is that it is almost impossible not to read elaborate stories into the images. Look, the Casserlys must have migrated east into Longford and Westmeath (tinyurl.ie/9vu). The Kilkenny Codys had just only begun to spread into East Cork by the 1850s (tinyurl.ie/9vc). The surname McNicholas must be relatively recent since it is so local (tinyurl.ie/9vd).

  But is any of this true?. As ever in research, you have to keep your sceptical goggles on. Pictures like these can indeed reveal hidden patterns, but they can also make things obvious that aren’t really there.

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

• The very model of a modern Registrar-General

  June 10, 2012 @ 11:50 am | by John Grenham

  The split personality of the General Register Office continues to cause problems. On the one hand, it provides spectacularly efficient registration of births, death and marriages to the public, and a superb identity verification service to other parts of the public service. On the other, it offers ludicrously inefficient research arrangements for historic civil records.

  In the research room, researchers spend weeks struggling with Victorian printed indexes to carry out searches that the staff computer system behind the counter can do in minutes. The frustration of being repeatedly forced to play Blind Man’s Buff grows with every visit. It feels like a different planet to the contemporary service.

  There are of course genuine obstacles to more open access, not least the legal restrictions. But a line in one of the twice-yearly Social Welfare Acts could remove them instantly: “Section 61 of the 2004 Civil Registration Act is hereby amended…” Even a little willingness to change could make a huge difference. These records are a unique part of our inheritance, and keeping them locked up like this is just plain wrong.

  The official attitude is well summed up by a sign at the lift that takes visitors up to the GRO research room: “NOTICE. Due to an unprecedented increase in customers accessing the genealogy services it may be necessary to close the office at times. This is done in the best interest of heatlh [sic] and safety for all who use the facility.”

  It’s those pesky genealogists again. They’re everywhere. They just won’t go away. They want to buy so much of what we’re selling, it’s positively unheatlhy. Why won’t they just leave us alone?

  ['Irish Roots archive from 2009 at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/column]

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