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Why are so many wonderful record-images beginning to appear on FamilySearch? The answer requires a long run-up …

Family history is an essential part of the practice of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aimed at ensuring that everyone who has ever lived and who ever will live will ultimately be united in one great family tree. (Donald Akenson’s Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself is a good, if slightly snide, account).

Because of this, the LDS have been collecting family history records since the 1890s and research in those records has been the main means of access to records for all family history researchers, Mormon and non-Mormon, for more than seventy years. Most Mormon temples have a Family History Centre that also opens to the public. Up to now, these Centres have depended on microfilm ordered via FamilySearch from the vast vaults of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City – their microfilms of the GRO registers are on open access in the Family History Centre in Dublin, for example.

Now that system is ending. From September 1st next, FamilySearch will discontinue its microfilm distribution services. The reason is simple: as microfilm declines in popularity the costs of storage and duplication have risen dramatically. In other words the internet killed it.

As a replacement FamilySearch promises that all its microfilm will be available as digital images. And that’s the reason for the tectonic shift we’ve been seeing recently in the availibility of Irish record images on the site: the Registry of Deeds, the GRO films, the Tithe survey, the National Archives testamentary collections and so much more. There is a simply a huge push on to get the films online before September.

Unfortunately, access permissions haven’t yet been sorted out for many of the records. Click on that tantalising little camera icon and more often than not you’ll be told: ” These images are viewable: 1. To signed-in members of supporting organizations. 2. When using the site at a family history center.”

I enquired if I could sign up to be a supporting organisation (“I’ll be ever so supporting, I promise”) only to be told that there is currently only one supporting organisation: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Personally, I’m delighted the microfilm is going. If they want someone to light the microfilm bonfire  and dance around it, count me in. Thirty years spent squinting down microfilm readers has left me loathing the stuff.

Experience suggests that those viewing barriers will eventually melt. And in the meantime, I live quite close to the Dublin Family History Centre.

The Mormon FamilySearch is without doubt the most important family history site in the world. It can also be a royal pain. For years I’ve been going to its main record collections for Ireland, picking out the most important one ‘Ireland Births and Baptisms, 1620-1881’ and then tearing my hair out trying to figure out what exactly I’m searching. Argh. ‘Index to selected Ireland births and baptisms. The year range represents most of the records. A few records may be earlier or later’. Argh.

It turns out I was making a basic mistake. Don’t go in the front door. Go around the house and sneak in through the back door, the catalogue. Try this for an experiment. Go to https://familysearch.org/catalog/search and just enter Ireland in the Place box. No fewer than two hundred and fifty-one separate categories pop up.

You can explore at your leisure. For now, just add ‘Public Record Office’ into the ‘Author’ box. You’ll get 395 subsections for PRONI and forty-two for “Ireland: Public Record Office”. Go down to the “Ireland: Public Record Office” subsection ‘Testamentary documents in the Public Record Office, Dublin’ and click. You’ll see a list of 136 microfilms of which 69 have the wonderful little camera icon beside them, meaning they’ve been digitised. Click on one of those and you’re in Wonderland. More than half of the NAI ‘D’,’ T’ and ‘M’ manuscript series are there, freely viewable. If you come up with a reference to  one of these (from NAI’s own card index, from the version on FindMyPast, from sources.nli.ie), you don’t have to schlep all the way to Bishop St., Dublin 8 (or your nearest LDS centre) to look at the full document. There it is, the 1866 will of John Gilmore.

And there’s more. The Betham notebook abstracting the family information from all Kildare diocesan wills up to 1828? No bother.  Eustace Street Dublin Presbyterian Registers? Certainly, sir.  Or what about the French Presentation NAI collection?

But of course my real reason for rummaging around like this is to find out exactly which Irish church records have been transcribed. Search on the church name and if a little microscope appears beside the film number, bingo, it’s been transcribed and you can go to the transcript by clicking on the microscope.

I’ve begun adding direct links to my own parish register listings – check out St. Peter’s, Athlone. Just click on the film number.

With genealogy blinkers on and up to your tonsils in luverly, luverly databases it can be hard to grasp the implications the records have for other areas of research. An obvious beneficiary is Joycean studies. Many of James Joyce’s characters are based on real individuals, often appearing under their own names. The period he writes about is slap in the middle of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, transparent and free online; Dublin parish registers are also online; and Dublin newspapers, and Dublin directories, and Dublin voters’ lists and maps and …

A few examples: Miss Douce “of the bronze hair”, immortalised in the Sirens episode of Ulysses, set in the Ormond Hotel, was actually Maggie Dowse, “manageress” of the Bailey in Duke St. in 1901 and a sister-in-law of the owner, William Hogan. No doubt “Douce” was a more suggestive variant.

The Dubedat family are celebrated in one of Ulysses’ many joyously puerile jokes – “May I tempt you … Miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did, bedad.” And there they are in Dublin Church of Ireland registers, the Du Bedats, Du Bidats, Dubédats …

Like genealogy, collecting Joyce trivia can become compulsive, and can lead in unexpected directions. A four-word headline noted in passing in Stephen Hero, “Mad Cow at Cabra”, recalls the practice of driving cattle through the city streets from the markets in Prussia Street via Phibsborough down to the cattle boats at the North Wall. Sometimes, understandably, a cow would run amok. As so often in Joyce, even the tiniest details are made out of real incidents.  The  Irish Times of April 2 1904 has two tiny news-items side by side on page 6: “Cow Shot at Cabra Road” and “Supposed Mad Dog”. Maybe even Joyce sometimes got confused?

For more Joycean fun see jjon.org.

As well as causing excess mortality in cats, idle curiosity is a great source of unlooked-for discoveries. Grazing the online 1911 census again recently, I tried searching the “infirmities” column under “More search options”. This is the section of the return where individuals were to be described as “Deaf and Dumb; Dumb only; Blind; Imbecile or Idiot; Or Lunatic”. The aim, one presumes, was to collect medical statistics, and the nature of the afflictions chosen implies interest in heredity. With hindsight, this looks like the beginnings of eugenics.

Inevitably, a large number of people filling out the form misunderstood its purpose, and saw this section as an invitation to tell the government about their health. All of these returns can be retrieved simply by choosing “Other” in the “Specified Illnesses” search box.

In the midst of the cheerful lists of “All right” and “No infirmity”, and the rather less cheerful “Bad Corn” and “Cold in Chest” and “Want of Money”, one return stood out. As their infirmity, Ellen Barry of Churchill Terrace in Sandymount and her two daughters had entered “unenfranchised”. Further investigation showed a number of similar returns, including a Kathleen Shannon of Lower Leeson Street who entered the wonderfully tart “Not naturally [infirm], but legally classed with imbeciles on account of my sex”.

The description of census day on the National Archives website, part of the fascinating and underappreciated contextual material, points out that the suffragette movement throughout the United Kingdom had called for a boycott of the census. Evidently, some suffragettes decided to be visible to history (and the census enumerators) by protesting on the form, rather than simply refusing to fill it out. Further idle grazing even shows a number of women recording their religion as “Militant suffragette”.

This is history in wonderful personal detail, and it is only possible because the National Archives has positively insisted on idle curiosity by making every single aspect of the censuses searchable.

Genealogists tend to focus very closely on questions of evidence. The reason is very simple. Many apparently sound family trees are riddled with inconsistencies, leaps of illogic and undocumented assertions. It is all too easy to waste weeks researching non-existent ancestors before uncovering the flaws in such pedigrees.

Given the nature of much genealogical evidence, with garbled family stories, ludicrously repetitive naming traditions and half-obliterated parish registers, absolute certainty is often impossible. The best a researcher can aim for is a well-reasoned argument that takes account of any surviving records or traditions, and assesses probabilities as dispassionately as possible. Even then, the pattern-seeker’s trap awaits: if you stare at gibberish long enough, it will start to look intelligible.

Take the Irish ancestry of Ronald Reagan. The earliest documented ancestor is Michael Regan, who married in England in 1852 and recorded his father as Thomas. The English 1851 census (very fortunately) gave Tipperary as his place of origin and his age as 21. So far, so good. And the researchers who searched Tipperary parish registers did indeed find a Michael, son of Thomas Regan, baptised in Ballyporeen in 1829.

But at least 20 of the 53 Catholic parishes of Tipperary have no records for the years around 1830. Both Michael and Thomas are unimaginably common forenames and there were more than 50 Regan households in the county at the time. Even for parishes that have records, five minutes on rootsireland (which only covers two-thirds of the county) will get you at least ten Thomas Regans baptising children over the period. So it is perfectly likely, probable in fact, that more than one Michael, son of Thomas, was baptised in the relevant period. A very slender basis on which to build the Ronald Reagan Visitor Centre.

However good the documentation, however impeccable the reasoning, humility and scepticism are always required. In the words of science writer Jonah Lehrer, just because something is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.

And just because it can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.

I’ve just spent the last ten days revising and updating my listing of the Catholic registers online at rootsireland and it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy: hour after hour of grinding through mismatched parish names and record dates, testing the ones that look dodgy, amending, adding, correcting … argh.

Still, it was long overdue – rootsireland is by a mile the most useful site for early Irish church records. I’ve been doing piecemeal updates to the listing for the past twenty years, as new records were covered or came online, but never a full-scale run-through. And it was worth the pain, because I learnt a lot.

First, it’s clear that a lot of fresh transcription work is going on in the heritage centres, Or at least some of the heritage centres. For some areas the transcriptions are now well into the first quarter of the twentieth century, and for others nothing has changed in twenty years.

‘Twas ever thus. The good centres have always been very very good and the bad ones horrid. It’s just that some of the horrid are now good and vice versa. (No names, just for now).

A surprising number of recent transcripts end in 1880. This is the cut-off of the National Library microfilms and the implication is clear: those transcripts are from the (sometimes godawful) films. Which means that rootsireland’s advantage over the Ancestry.com/FindMyPast transcripts  – copying directly from the originals – doesn’t exist for those transcripts.

Fortunately, these are only a small minority. More often, rootsireland actually has registers missed by NLI – Sligo, Roscommon, Carrick-on-Shannon … And one of the central axioms of Irish genealogy is thus confirmed: no generalisation about Irish records is true, including this one.

The rootsireland listings themselves can be deeply peculiar. In some parts of the country, records that used to be online seem to have vanished. In other parts, centres seem to be keeping a wary eye on the Church’s recently-enunciated ban on making public any records less than 100 years old. In most cases, centres with online records later than the offending date have simply amended the public listing to conform, but left the actual records searchable. Waterford, in particular, has solved the difficulty of having some records going up to the 1950s by just hiding all its finish dates. An Irish solution to an Irish problem.

And there are many other idiosyncrasies.  Wicklow has a fine collection of burial records, both Catholic and C of  I. Not a one is online. And many centres have mis-listed their own records, with the wrong dates listed or entire parishes missing.

Strangely, because the Ulster Historical Foundation is a seriously scholarly outfit, by far the least reliable listings are for Antrim and Down. Whatever the UHF listing might say, there are no Catholic  baptismal registers anywhere on the planet for Aghagallon before 1828, or Ballymoney before 1853 or Ballyclare before 1869. I suspect a longstanding oversight, but it needs some serious attention.

I ran into Bernadette Marks,the doyenne of the Swords Heritage Centre recently and she reminded me of how unkind I’d been about the centres in the past. I reminded her of how I’d changed my tune. But really it’s still carp carp carp, Mr Grenham.

So be on your guard about what it is you’re actually searching on the site. Or just look at the (Updated! Free!) listings.

And if you see any mistakes, please let me know. All carps gladly received.

Most researchers are familiar with two types of record associated with cemeteries, headstone transcripts and church burial registers. But headstones were a luxury and burial registers, where they exist, are usually very uncommunicative about the family of the deceased.

However, a third class of cemetery record also exists, much less well known and much more informative. These are the local authority interment records.

What are they and why were they created?

The Public Health (Ireland) Act 1878  created public authority sanitary districts under the control of the Poor Law Boards of Guardians, and gave them responsibility for sewage, drains, water supply and … cemeteries.  When county councils came into existence in 1898 they inherited this mortuary responsibility and, it would appear, took it more seriously than their predecessors. At any rate, they began to keep records of every burial in the graveyards they controlled.

And what records they were! Most included the plot, the address, the date of death, the age at death, the cause of death, marital status, occupation, date of burial, next of kin …

They were never intended to be public records, their relatively late start made them less obvious as genealogical sources and many have not survived, but over the past few years, some local authorities have begun to open them up for research. As guides to extended families, and clues for possible living relatives, they are wonderful. And sometimes, in the level of personal detail, just a little hair-raising.

Here’s a list of any I know are available, either online or in local archives. If you know of any others, please tell me and I’ll add them.

Cork	Five cemeteries online at Cork Archives, another 15 onsite
Dublin (Fingal)	Just launched online, a superb collection covering 33 graveyards in north Dublin and including more than 65,000 entries.
Dublin city	Online transcript of the registers for Bluebell, Clontarf and Finglas. More please.
Kerry	The mother of all online interment register collections. More than 140 cemeteries with records coming right up to 2010.
Kildare	A full collection onsite at Kildare Archives
Laois	Registers of 27 graveyards, in the local studies section of Laois County Library.
Limerick	Mount St Lawrence, complete from 1855
Mayo	Full list of the registers held by the council.
Offaly	Scanned copies of all available at the county library.
Waterford	Six cemeteries online
Wexford	Thirteen sets of graveyard registers on microfilm at the county archives.

I got bored last Wednesday and decided to map the 1901 census. By Saturday, it was done.

Having already mapped the District Electoral Divisions for the 1911 census, it was clear that there would be less work for 1901, but I was surprised (to put it mildly) at how little was involved. Most of the effort went into tracking down DEDs which the National Archives had recorded under different spellings for 1901 and 1911.  Grumble, grumble.

It’s all too easy to trip over so many maps, so I also introduced a new, maps-only navigation box (e.g. Sugrue). Because it’s now simple to skip from 1850s to 1901 and 1911, one of the unexpected things that’s emerging is how persistent some variant spellings can be in the same area over multiple generations. Have a look at McGrory versus McCrory, for example. Prima facie evidence that, though the Gaelic original of both surnames may have been Mac Ruaidhrí, there were (at least) two distinct family lines by the mid-nineteenth century.

(But wait, I hear you say. Don’t you beat everyone around the head about how unreliable Irish surnames are as indicators of lineage? Aren’t you contradicting yourself?

To which the response is that, as well as the slipperiness of surnames, one of my other axioms is that every generalisation you make about Irish genealogy can be contradicted. Even this one.)

Anyway. The 1901 map has all the flaws of the 1911. There’s still the long grind of adding large numbers of long-incidence surnames to my surnames variants tables. My summer holidays.

The site now has maps of Pender’s survey of 1659, Griffith’s (1847-64), the GRO birth indexes 1864-1913 and the 1901 and 1911 censuses.

That’s a long two-century gulf before Griffith’s.  Any suggestions for a good country-wide 18th-century data-set?

The Local Government Act of 2001 provided that every local authority in Ireland had to make arrangements for the proper management, custody, care and conservation of local records and local archives. Before then (with the noble exceptions of Cork, Dublin and Limerick), local record-keeping in Ireland was piecemeal at best.

The imposition of this new role did not have an immediate or uniform effect. Some councils just added the new job to the in-tray of their long-suffering county library. Others went about setting up an archives, but only for the council’s own records. But many, painfully, with prodding and funding assistance from central government, eventually set up dedicated archives with a broad remit, to serve as a focal point for local studies, and to preserve and make available local records.

The fruits of the policy are only now becoming apparent, at least to me. An entire network of new Irish record-holding institutions is coming into existence. As ever in Ireland, when they’re good, they’re very very good. And when they’re bad … we’ll just move on in silence.

More recently, the best have begun to make collections available online, free, naturally. Here are some I’ve come across:

• Galway Archives has some wonderful online collections, including 1775 tenants’ lists from the Headford area;

  

• Mayo Library has a superb collection of estate maps online, including details of tenants from 1811 in Balla, Kilcolman and Mayo parishes;
• Tipperary Studies has an extraordinary set of 130 Tipperary rate books from the 1840s and early 1850s, predating Griffith and created in parallel with his Valuation;
• Cork Archives has the burial registers of five cemeteries in an around Cork city;
• Limerick Archives has the Mount St Lawrence Burial registers and its Local Studies sister site has an extraordinary mix of city and county material;
• Sligo Library has the Sligo Union Workhouse admissions and discharges register online (FindMyPast have a transcribed version);
• And of course Dublin City Archive has a fantastic (disclosure: I coded them) collection of heritage databases at databases.dublincity.ie.

Even where records are not searchable online, most of the new archives have excellent online lists of their records, many of which are only now coming to light: the estate records in Wexford, Waterford and Donegal, the Grand Jury records of Louth and Clare, the historic photographs and maps popping up everywhere.

To find the archive (if there is one) for the area you’re interested in, just google “[county] archives”.

God bless you, Section 80 of the Local Government Act, 2001.

There’s a lot of good sense to be had in a lot of reggae lyrics, but not in Junior Murvin’s ‘Solomon’ :

‘Solomon was the wisest man,
But he didn’t know the secrets that I know now.
I am wiser than Solomon …’

Every time I listen to it – frequently – I can’t resist quibbling: Yes, Junior, we now know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, that Beijing is in China and that potatoes taste good with butter and salt, and poor old Solomon didn’t know any of those things. But that doesn’t mean we’re any wiser than he was.

It’s all too easy to condescend to your ancestors, even if you’re a good Rastafarian. Time and distance naturally simplify things, and there is no doubt that our lives are very different to lives lived even 100 years ago. It is hard not think of people who lived in previous centuries as somehow less complicated than us.

Genealogy is a good cure for such thinking. The more you find out about your ancestors, the more complicated and individual they become. You can’t think of them as quaint, fixed to the one spot, sepia-toned. They moved and worried and loved and lied, and they were just as uncertain about their futures as we are about ours.

The biggest contrast between their lives and ours is comfort: we have central heating and anaesthetics. That doesn’t make us more complex, or smarter, or wiser.

And the most substantial thing that they didn’t know, and that we know now, is what was going to happen to them. There is irony in this, and some sadness, but no basis for disrespect.

The only real difference between us and our ancestors is that they’re dead and we’re not. And that’s not going to last.