Month: January 2023

In Irish research, birth, marriage and death records are most definitely not created equal. State death records capture only incidental family information, births give just a single generation, but a marriage record supplies both fathers’ names and occupations, the couple’s ages, addresses and occupations, their witnesses, the clergyman’s name, the church …  Loads and loads of loverly threads for us all to follow.

Marriages are also the earliest, starting in 1845, and the easiest to find, with two big bull’s-eyes, bride and groom, both appearing in the indexes, begging to be cross-referenced.

So happy days.  We’ve now got the Latter Day Saints transcripts of Irish General Register Office marriage indexes 1845-1922 mapped and available on the site. Check out Hession, for example .

In the great gappy jigsaw puzzle that is Irish research, there are only four universally useful record-sets:

• Griffith’s,
• Parish registers,
• 1901 and 1911 censuses
• GRO birth, marriage and death records.

These new marriage maps are our final piece of that puzzle. It’s only taken us ten years.

Because the records are a bit different, we’ve treated them a bit differently. You can search using a forename, and the double surname search offers an option to check for actual marriages between the two surnames on IrishGenealogy. Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day.

If you detect a certain hesitancy in the enthusiasm, it’s because time spent cloistered with these records has once more provided a close-up of their imperfections. Again, numerous records are skipped, duplicated and mangled. Whoever was responsible for the 1890s once again used their spreadsheet fill-down function as a shortcut for duplicate records. Except that many many are not duplicate, and so are just plain wrong. And of course the same problems here and on FamilySearch are also in the licensed copies on Ancestry and FindMyPast. Sup with a very long spoon.

Before getting involved in mapping their marriage (and death) indexes, if you’d asked me what I thought of the FamilySearch validation process, I’d have said it was pretty good. Years back, I signed up online to be a transcriber for them (just being nosy) and it seemed like a serious business: double transcripts automatically checked against each other, with conflicts resolved by a third party. Mar dhea.

And what do I think of the FamilySearch validation process now? It would have been a good idea.

 

 

Grief is one of the drivers of genealogy, whether we acknowledge it or not, and a reason why most of us are middle-aged or older: only after losses brought by age do you feel the need to slow the decay involved in forgetting. So grief can be put to use. It can even be beautiful.

What brought an odd thought like this this to mind was listening to a folk-song, “The Lost Words Blessing”, part of a musical version of the children’s book The Lost Words.  A 2017 collaboration between the nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the painter Jackie Morris, the book was a response to the exclusion of twenty names for everyday nature from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, due to their underuse by contemporary children. The lost words included such ordinary things as Acorn, Wren, Hare, Otter, Lark … Their omission from the Dictionary was simply recognition that nature  has receded farther and farther from the lives of children, a tiny poignant symptom of the vast extinctions happening around us in the natural world as we consume more and more of it.

The paintings and poems in the book are extraordinary, and I have no doubt they succeed in their aim of intriguing children into love of these wonderful ordinary creatures who are leaving us forever. But the book is necessarily an elegy for the natural world it celebrates, with some of its beauty coming from that elegiac tinge.

In the song, that atmosphere becomes almost unbearably intense. The words bless a child entering into the world and pray for the child to recognize and take on the natural qualities of the heron and the kingfisher and the otter, even as the animals themselves are ceasing to exist. They will somehow survive in that way, as an afterlife, a glint of light in a starling’s eye reflected out into the universe “past dying stars exploding” – “Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter”.

It is a kind of survival, but only in the sense that our ancestors survive in a family tree. It is making beautiful use of grief.

As you might gather, I found the song very moving. That might have been due to listening to it on Hogmanay with a glass of whiskey in my hand and hearing a Scottish singer wonderfully rhyme Otter with Water. See what you think yourself. Song here, words here.

Happy New Year.