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 Ā£200 out of him.Ā  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.

19 thoughts on “Don’t tell my publisher”

  1. Thank you. Your book and site are my go-to resources when researching my husband’s 24 3rd great grandparents who came to the US from Ireland.

  2. Regarding Church of Ireland clergy, I have also found Cotton’s Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae, 6 vols., 1851-1860, to be helpful especially when unable to access a Leslie Succession List for a particular diocese.

  3. Wow, I had no idea the whole book was online, I just bought the hardbound edition from Genealogical.com! I will be sure to update this book info into my handout when I repeat my class on “Finding Your Irish Ancestors” given by our community college (free, online) while everyone is locked down here during the pandemic. I will also be giving a demo of your website and the various features, such as finding parishes with two surnames in Griffiths. I love showing how just putting in a surname on the home page can often help someone pin down where they might be from if they have no other info other than “Ireland.”

    Despite your having it online, I’m very glad to have a printed copy to read at leisure. And for others reading this Comment, note that Amazon and others have only the paperbound edition, but as of April 2020 Genealogical.com still has hardbound.

  4. Hi John, just wondering if this is available in epub form and if so where to purchase as I don’t have a kindle or any apple products. If not is there a way to get hold of a hard copy? Would really love to read this book, and thank you for your blog, it is full of great information for all of us who are trying to find more ways to get info on our long gone relatives. Michelle

  5. Thanks John. Great news. Your blogs make great reading especially when lockdown is in charge of our lives. By the way , ROOTS has included the Kerry and Cork records recently!!

  6. Good news but I must say I miss your weekly blog post. Always informative and entertaining. Hope you are well and hope you post soon.

  7. Not available yet on Kindle in U.S. Tried to order from Amazon UK, but was unsuccessful. I will continue to look for it, as Kindle is more convenient for me. If there are ā€œliveā€ links in the Kindle version, it will be a great feature.

    Thanks for your work.

  8. Is there a timeline for the ebook to be available in the US? Really looking forward to a Kindle or an Apple version. Thanks!

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