What the site does
Irish Ancestors aims to be the first online stopping-off point for anyone interested in researching their Irish Ancestors.
Its Browse section includes: most of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors; the largest online collection of Irish genealogy links; detailed civil and Roman Catholic parish maps; a step-by-step how-to section; and an extensive collection of articles on Irish heritage and genealogy. All are available free.
The Surnames section includes free counts of households by county, a surname dictionary, surname histories, coats of arms, links to surname sites and more.
The Placenames section includes a freely searchable database transcript of the 1851 Townlands Index, with results linked to the civil parish maps.
The paying sections of the site (either pay-per-view or subscription) include a parish-by-parish count of households, detailed listings of records for each civil parish, Lewis' Topographical Dictionary, linked to the placename search, a double surname search and "Ancestor Search", an expert system taking user input and analysing it to produce a detailed profile of all relevant research sources.
In existence since 1998, Irish Ancestors is the longest-established Irish genealogy web-site and was one of the first successful Irish e-commerce sites. It incorporates and extends Grenham's Irish Recordfinder. A site-map is available here.
I now do all the maintenance, support and development of the site, using Cold Fusion/Bluedragon and Oracle 10.