Month: April 2016

One of the perennial problems I face is responding to the question “What do you do?”

“Genealogist” doesn’t quite cover it (and constitutes a dangerous open invitation to tell me about Granny Murphy). “Software developer” isn’t right either, because all the software I do is connected to Irish genealogy and heritage. Same for “writer”, same for “teacher”.

Twenty years ago, out of sheer badness I occasionally used to answer, “I’m a cowboy taxonomist”.  Taxonomy is the science of pigeon-holing, and at the time I was deeply involved in developing the software that underlies almost all of this website. It entailed dozens of interrelated categories and sub-categories, all ready to store information about genealogical sources.

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed it. As I put it to a poor, puzzled soul I once cornered as a party: “I have no interest in looking at every single gravestone transcript in Co. Tyrone. But I really, really want to know where they all are.”

When I originally collaborated with The Irish Times in putting the results of this cowboy taxonomy online, the plan in the back of my mind was that I’d use that income to keep on expanding and populating those pigeon-holes. And to some extent, that’s what happened. To misquote John Lennon, now I know how many pigeon-holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

But many other things got in the way over the years, and the expansion slowed way down.

The collaboration with The Times is now ending, and one of the unexpected side-effects is that the classifying juices have started flowing again.

Already, the way newspaper transcripts is handled has changed completely – you can now compare, county-by-county, what years of what relevant newspapers are online (look at Waterford, for example). General Register Office records likewise, now down to local registrar’s district level.

And I have plans. Map the surnames in Pender’s Census. Rejig the old step-by-step wizard to reflect the revolution in online access. Master the explosion of new gravestone transcript sites. More record-images, more maps –  Irish research ever simpler, ever more transparent.

Which suggests another response to that what-do-you-do question: “OCD genealogist”. Or is that just tautology?

After 18 years, the Irish Times/Irish Ancestors sub-site is winding down and transferring here, johngrenham.com.

From this morning, the Times is no longer accepting payment for any reports, instead offering a link that will take the user here, to a free version of each report. From next week, some of the legacy services will be redirected, telling users (and Google) that the service has moved permanently. A week-by-week process will increase the number of services redirected until May 23^rd, when the Irish Times sub-site will cease to operate.

All the services on this site will remain free until May 11^th,  after which a soft pay-wall will ask for a small monthly subscription after five free daily page-views. All users who have paid for Irish Times/Irish Ancestors reports will continue to have full free access here.

Obviously, I have mixed feelings about the change.  From the very outset in 1998, it was clear that a genealogy sub-site was out of place on a newspaper website, especially a genealogy sub-site not fully owned by the newspaper. I always thought of the relationship as symbiotic: I was the little bird that picked the crocodile’s teeth.

Ironically, it’s the success of the internet itself that has finally produced this parting of the ways. While the Times website was the Cinderella of the organisation, hard-working but neglected, my sub-site was welcome. But as the online side came front and centre, the Ancestors bit fell behind,  increasingly clunky and out-of-date.

By last year, it was clear that there were only two options. Either the sub-site got serious attention, with redevelopment and some marketing muscle, or it had to go.

In the end, it’s entirely understandable that, if the choice was between using scarce resources for online journalism or for redeveloping a genealogy sub-site, there could only be one result.

The crocodile got dentures.

Most people have very limited horizons when they think about their ancestors. It’s 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 and slime mould 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 occurrence 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.