This book is designed to help you trace your Irish roots back as far as they can go.
If you are living outside Ireland, the first task is to trace back to your Irish immigrant ancestor. Most people alive now with Irish roots live outside Ireland – mainly due to the mass migration of the 19th century, and in particular the Great Famine of the 1840s.
If you are using this book in Ireland, or already know your Irish place of origin, after reading part 1 of the book you may want to turn directly to part 3 (p. 72), where you’ll find resources for tracing ancestry within Ireland.
This book will be useful, too, for anyone wanting to trace relatives, because all Irish families, without exception, have cousins all over the world, from Britain to Argentina and Canada to New Zealand, often within only a handful of generations.
For many people, the most difficult step is finding where in Ireland your ancestors came from. If records in the country of migration don’t tell you, there are various techniques you can employ to ascertain the most likely areas – mainly by localising the surname and, now, seeking DNA matches. In most cases you will succeed. Then, you can explore your family using Irish records, seeking cousins, learning about your family’s social history, and tracing back as far as records allow. You may get back many centuries but, sadly, due to lack of records, many lines don’t go back much further than the early 19th century.
If so, you’ll still have the immense pleasure of being able to visit an obscure corner of Ireland, and say (or just think, if you’re more modest) ‘my people came from here!’. But having done so, please don’t let the limitations of the sources blind you into thinking you’ve reached the end of the trail. For within Ireland, families have tended to remain fairly stationary for long periods of time. Where any earlier records for your ancestral area survive, you may pick up members of earlier generations – serving in local militias, employed as officials on landed estates, or in an Elizabethan pardon for taking part in a local rising.
The same applies to going back yet further. Because Ireland was not invaded by Rome, yet was converted to Christianity early on, it has one of the richest storehouses of traditional genealogy in the world. Most surnames fit into old family trees showing when and how they originated. Early pedigrees in many cases trace back to the younger sons of the Irish kings, to within a few centuries of the start of the Christian era. Before then, pedigrees based perhaps more in myth than reality stretch right back into the mists of time, to the heroic days when the Sons of Mil, the Milesian ancestors of the modern Irish, wrested green Erin (old Ireland) from the ancient gods, the Tuatha de Danann. Such old pedigrees tell of legendary ancestors, and we simply don’t know how many grains of truth they may contain.
When I was writing this book, the Chief Herald of Ireland himself was kind enough to talk to me about our Milesian forebears. ‘Ultimately’, he said, ‘the myth is what sustains you. It doesn’t matter if it is true: for what is unquestionably true is the belief our ancestors had in the myth.’ Neither he nor I would ever advocate imagining that ancient Irish ancestors were definite historical characters. But to research your Irish ancestry and not thoroughly enjoy finding personal connections, albeit just through your surname, to the grand, heroic traditions of this beautiful island, would be as daft as flying all the way from New York to Dublin, and then not leaving your hotel room.
There’s never been a better time to research your Irish ancestors, either. With the great advances in the way records are catalogued, indexed, archived and even made available on the Internet, it’s vastly cheaper and easier to trace your Irish roots than ever before. But these positive developments are nothing compared to what comes next. At each stage of your journey, from finding your Irish kin, and your ancestral home, and testing out the ancient cousinships suggested by Medieval and even legendary pedigrees, the spanking-new science of genetics has completely revolutionised this revered old subject of ours. Having your DNA examined is incredibly easy and now relatively cheap. The more people who add their test results to databases, the more extraordinary the emerging results become. Some long-established genealogical ‘truths’ have already been crushed. And, amazingly, some ancient family trees, that most serious scholars thought couldn’t possibly be true, have been tested by this cutting-edge scientific approach – and been found to be correct after all.
If you’re already well advanced on your journey, I hope this book will assist you to make wonderful new discoveries. If you’ve just started – behold the world of possibilities that awaits you!
Abbreviations
| CHC | County Heritage Centre (Irish) |
| CoE | Church of England (Anglican) |
| CoI | Church of Ireland |
| FHC | Mormon Family History Centre |
| FRC | Family Records Centre (London) |
| GPC | Genealogical Publishing Company |
| Grenham | John Grenham, Tracing your Irish Ancestors: The Complete Guide (Gill & Macmillan, 3rd edn, 2006) |
| GO | Genealogical Office |
| GRO | General Register Office |
| GRONI | General Register Office of Ireland |
| MMF | Mormon microfilm |
| NAI | National Archives of Ireland |
| NARA | National Archives and Records Administration |
| NAS | National Archives of Scotland |
| NLI | National Library of Ireland |
| NLS | National Library of Scotland |
| NSW | New South Wales |
| NZNA | New Zealand National Archives |
| NZNL | New Zealand National Library |
| PRONI | Public Record Office of Northern Ireland |
| RCBL | Representative Church Body Library |
| RGNI | Registrar General of Northern Ireland |
| Ryan | James G. Ryan, Irish Records, Sources for Family and Local History (Ancestry Incorporated [USA] and Flyleaf Press [Ireland], 1997, revised edn, n.d.) |
| TNA | The National Archives (Great Britain) |
PART 1 Tracing back to Ireland: first steps