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Your Irish Ancestors - Are You Ready to Discover Them?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

If you’ve got Irish ancestors, you may have already experienced frustration in trying to track them down. It can be daunting enough to start a family genealogy project dealing with American ancestors. Once you start looking for kith and kin in other countries, it really gets mind-boggling! Often, other countries don’t have many well-preserved records, or the records that exist are hard to find. If you’re working on your Irish genealogical quest through email and postal mail to try to find anything, it gets even harder.

Still, the Internet is continually advancing the world of genealogy, and nations all over the world are making a concerted effort to preserve important historical documents. If you’re searching for Irish ancestors today, there are so many more resources available to you than just 10 years ago. Now, you stand a real chance of uncovering the identities and lives of your kinfolk from the Emerald Isle.

So, where do you start? The first thing you must do in ANY genealogical project, whether of Irish lines or American ones, is to find out if the work has already been done. Many family lines have been traced long ago by the genealogists of yesteryear, and this research has often been compiled and published online by modern scholars or family history enthusiasts. If you do a search online using such resources as Google, Ancestry.com, and Amazon.com, you may be surprised at what you find. If your family history has already been researched, then all you have to do is re-trace the steps of the original researcher to confirm the information is correct.

But what do you do if there isn’t a pre-existing family history? Start looking through your existing information. Check all of the documents, newspaper clippings, diaries, photos, and letters belonging to your ancestors that have been passed down through your family. Most families have at least some information of this sort. Go through it all carefully, combing it for clues as to the identities of your Irish ancestors. Look for names, birth and death dates, marriage dates, and places of birth mentioned in any document in your possession.

Once you’ve gotten some basic information to go on-or if you were unable to find anything new among your family’s artifacts-it’s time to jump into the world of online genealogy. There are plenty of websites with Irish databases available, some of which are dedicated to Irish research entirely. In these databases, you can check such things as Irish census returns, Griffith’s Valuation, parish registers, civil registration records, and more. These should offer you important clues about your ancestors, and may even introduce you to them outright. Some of the most popular and well-stocked Irish genealogy databases online today can be found at:

  • Ancestry.com
  • The Origins Network
  • One Great Family

By making use of what you already have and combining it with new information you can find online, you’re sure to learn a lot more about your Irish ancestors than you previously knew. Once you’ve got the basics of their lives confirmed, you can start digging deeper to find out the details of who they were and how they lived by requesting copies of original records from the General Register office in Dublin. However, you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by just how much information on your Irish family history you can find from the comfort of your own home online.

Are you ready to dive head-first into the wonderful world of Irish genealogy? Are you excited by the prospect of discovering new ancestors from the Emerald Isle, but don’t know how to start? Come to Irish Genealogical, the Internet’s best place for Irish genealogy, where you’ll learn everything you need to know about uncovering your Irish ancestry!

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Your Irish Last Name Can Provide Important Clues to Your Family History

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Your Irish last name can tell you far more than only that your ancestors were from Ireland. It can actually be the key you need to pinpoint the exact area in Ireland where your ancestors lived. Because many Irish families stayed in the same general location for generations, it’s not unusual for a certain surname to only be seen within a radius of a few square miles for hundreds of years. Even when surnames spread out somewhat in Irish genealogical research, they still often stay within one particular county. If you know the area in Ireland to which your surname was common, you can often break through some long-standing genealogical brick walls.

There are several databases online that provide geographical links to many an Irish last name. One of the best-organized of such databases is found at CensusFinder.com. However, this website only catalogues the most common Irish surnames by location. More obscure or less common names may not be included. If this is the case for you, doing a Google search for your surname and including the phrase “Irish county” in your search terms should help you find the geographical information you’re looking for. There are also a wide variety of Irish genealogy message boards available to help you track down your surname’s county of origin.

One more important thing to remember about Irish surnames is that the name itself can give you important clues as to the history of the family. For example, surnames with O’ in front of them (such as O’Malley and O’Connor) mean “grandson of.” So, O’Malley would literally mean “grandson of Malley” and O’Connor would mean “grandson of Connor.” Surnames with “Mc” in front of them mean “son of.” Knowing this information, combined with being aware of the county of origin of your ancestors, can help you locate some of your most ancient ancestors and give you the clues you need to trace your Irish family into the present.

Are you ready to dive head-first into the wonderful world of Irish genealogy? Are you excited by the prospect of discovering new ancestors from the Emerald Isle, but don’t know how to start? Come to Irish Genealogical, where you’ll learn everything you need to know about uncovering your Irish ancestry!

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How to Start Your Irish Genealogical Quest

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Are you ready to begin your own Irish genealogical quest? You’re not alone. Today, over 34 million people in the United States alone have Irish ancestry. It’s one of the most commonly searched nationalities in American genealogy. Thanks to a huge wave of immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish roots are found in every part of American life.

Not only is Ireland well-represented among the population of the United States, it can be found throughout the world. People in nearly every nation on earth have ancestry that could ultimately lead them on an Irish genealogical quest. The people of Ireland have been fanning out throughout the world since as early as the 7th century, when monks from the “Emerald Isle” set out to bring Christianity to the masses in Europe. Emigration continued at a steady pace until the 19th century, when it exploded! The infamous potato famine was happening then, and it caused 2 million Irish nationals to emigrate to nations all over the world, but particularly England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

If you want to identify your Irish ancestors and get to know who they were, there’s now plenty of opportunity to do so. Today, there are more records than ever that have been opened to the public, and even made available online! Lots of websites, such as the Origins Network, now make Irish genealogical records available online for a small monthly fee. You can use these websites to find such important records as birth, death, and marriage records, church registers, census records, and rosters of property owners (also known as Griffiths Valuation). So, get out there and get started on your path to discovering your Irish ancestors! They’re looking forward to meeting you!

Are you ready to dive head-first into the wonderful world of Irish genealogy? Are you excited by the prospect of discovering new ancestors from the Emerald Isle, but don’t know how to start? Come to Irish Genealogical, the Internet’s best place for Irish genealogy, where you’ll learn everything you need to know about uncovering your Irish ancestry!

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How to Use Irish Naming Traditions to Learn More About Your Irish Roots

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Many genealogists use surnames to dig up their Irish roots. This is an important and sound technique, because surnames can often point to the Irish county from which your ancestors came. However, surnames aren’t the only type of name you can use to trace your Irish ancestry. Thanks to common traditional naming patterns across the country in the 19th century, first names can also often provide an important clue as to the identities of your elusive family members. Here’s how:

Nineteenth-century Irish family naming patterns usually followed the guidelines in the list below pretty closely:

1. The oldest son was named after the father’s father.

2. The oldest daughter was named after the mother’s mother.

3. The second son was named after the mother’s father.

4. The third son was named after the father.

5. The fourth son was named after the father’s oldest brother.

6. The second daughter was named after the father’s mother.

7. The third daughter was named after the mother.

8. The fourth daughter was named after the mother’s oldest sister.

As you can see, this type of naming pattern can potentially provide important clues to your Irish roots. It’s especially useful in cases where you don’t know the names of the parents of a particular ancestor. By looking at how he named his children, you can have an idea as to what his parents (and siblings) names may have been. While the above guidelines were by no means set in stone, and sometimes varied, the pattern was usual enough in the 19th century to be of real use to genealogists searching for Irish ancestors.

By looking at naming patterns when searching for the parents of an ancestor, you can keep a closer eye out for potential candidates by looking at their first names. Of course, you should always verify and document all information, and never assume to know an ancestor’s name simply by what it would be according to the above list. But, for example, if you’re looking for the parents of an Irish ancestor named Michael Donnahue, and you know Michael’s first-born son was named Martin, then this might be a clue that Michael’s father’s name was also Martin. In this case, you can look more closely at men by the name of Martin Donnahue who lived in the same area as Michael and were of the right age to be Michael’s father.

Knowing the traditional naming patterns helps you find your Irish roots by alerting you to clues of identities you may have otherwise missed. Use it cautiously, but do use it! It can help you tremendously!

Are you ready to dive head-first into the wonderful world of Irish genealogy? Are you excited by the prospect of discovering new ancestors from the Emerald Isle, but don’t know how to start? Come to Irish Genealogical, the Internet’s best place for Irish genealogy, where you’ll learn everything you need to know about uncovering your Irish ancestry!

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