Don’t tell my publisher

For a while, the guides to Irish records in the free Browse section of the site have been looking more and more grizzled and long in the tooth, based as they were on the 2011 edition of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors.

Lockdown grizzled. Also long in the tooth.

So a nice long lockdown seemed like the perfect opportunity to dig in and update everything. It was a bit of a slog, though in a nicely mindless way, and now it’s finished. The entire text of the 2019 edition is up, with completely new sections on starting out and graveyards, along with new short accounts of researching Irish ancestors in the Army, attorneys and barristers, clergymen, teachers, policemen and doctors.

The 2019 edition was actually finished in August 2018, due to the long lead-in time for publishing a book. So I’ve also added in all the updates to records since then, the extra years of civil marriages and deaths on IrishGenealogy.ie, the Galway burial registers, the new transcripts on FindMyPast and Ancestry and Rootsireland. It was particularly satisfying to include direct links to everything rather than just printing them. And good fun to lash in loads more illustrations.

Esther Johnston to Dean Swift (1718) Memorial 20 431 11148

My favourite new illustration is the 1718 deed where Esther Johnston sells her life companion Jonathan Swift “the messuage or tenement commonly known as Talbot’s Castle in the town of Trim in the county of Meath“. She got £200 out of him.  Anglo-Irish pragmatism at its finest.

But Murphy’s Law rules, even in pandemics. So naturally as I was finishing the updates last week, I got word from my publisher that the ebook versions of the 2019 edition would shortly be appearing on Kindle and Apple Books. Ulp.

Shhh.