Archives, Family History and Genetics

Children's agency as local citizens – creative approaches for teaching local history

Mary Immaculate College

6:00pm via Zoom

Tuesday 19 Mar 2024

by Paddy Waldron

WWW version: http://www.pwaldron.info/MaryI/2024

YouTube version: TBA

Outline:

• Start with private family records
• Continue with basic online public records
• Go further back in time with supplementary online and offline public records
  
• Confirm and extend your conclusions using DNA
• Record your findings efficiently
• Reconcile conflicting evidence

Private records

• Start with yourself and work backwards, to parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents, etc.
• Genealogy is about names, dates and places.
• These are the bones; family history is the flesh on those bones.

• Step 1: interview your elders
• record oral histories
• in the spirit of the The Schools' Collection of the 1930s
  
• organisations like Cuimhneamh an Chláir could put more emphasis on genealogy
  
• use your smartphone (voice recorder, video recorder, camera)
• ask them:
• tell me about your parents
• tell me about your grandparents
• tell me about your greatgrandparents
• etc.
• Step 2: find out who has the family papers
• are there in memoriam cards in a prayer book or elsewhere?
• the Clare Roots Society Mortuary Cards project was a collaboration between
• Clare Roots Society
• Clare Education Centre
• Clare County Library
• primary schools throughout County Clare
• Dunkerrin Reachingout Heritage Group had a similar project, resulting in a book
• Churchill Heritage Group followed suit
• the Ballybrown Parish Journal regularly includes pages of in memoriam cards
• are there scrapbooks or newscuttings?
• if not, then the relevant local newspapers may be searchable:
• Irish Newspaper Archives (search here)
• The "British" NEWSPAPER Archives
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an imperfect technology, so multiple searches may be required to find an article
• are the old family photographs labelled?
  
• are there letters or diaries or other manuscript materials?
• are there deeds to family property, at home or in the custody of a solicitor or a bank?
• Step 3: visit the family graves and graveyards
• transcribe the inscriptions before they fade beyond recognition
• has the local graveyard already been transcribed at, e.g.:
• Historicgraves.com
• Irish Graveyards
  
• IGP Headstone Project
• Clare County Library or other local scheme
  
• INTERMENT.NET
  
• Find a Grave
• graveyard transcriptions quickly become out-of-date due to new inscriptions on old graves and new burials
• if there are no searchable transcriptions, then organise a training course and transcription project with Historicgraves.com

• Following a debacle in 2014-2015 it was decided that the civil records of births, marriages and deaths (BMDs), which have been public records since 1864, would remain online only for:
• births over 100 years ago (due to data protection legislation relating to living individuals)
• marriages over 75 years ago (due to data protection legislation relating to living individuals)
• deaths over 50 years ago (for unspecified reasons)
• While hard copy indexes were originally printed quarterly, online indexes are updated annually, usually several weeks into the new year, and 1923 births/1948 marriages/1973 deaths have only recently been released.
  
• Once you have identified Irish ancestors whose BMD dates are before these cut-off years, then the search can move on to online public records.

• Sources very widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so consideration must be given to how to include students whose ancestors have come to Ireland only in recent generations.
• Such students (or all students) could also use the sources discussed below to compile "house histories": histories of their present homes and of the previous occupiers of the home and of the land on which the home is built.
  

Basic public records

• The basic online public records are:
• the afore-mentioned civil records of births, marriages and deaths starting from 1 Jan 1864 (1 Apr 1845 for non-Catholic marriages, 1871 for online deaths), searchable by some fields here and here
• indexes only up to 1958
  
• the 1901 and 1911 census returns, searchable here, along with surviving fragments of the lost 1821-1891 census returns
• The Death and Burial Data: Ireland 1864-1922 project (DBDIrl) is indexing all fields from the death records (Transcribathon at UL, 21 Apr 2023)
• rootsireland.ie provides subscribers with access to better indexes for some parts of the country
  
• Note the following caveats relating to places, names and dates ...
  

Places

• For common surnames, knowledge of geographical divisions is essential, and for any surname it is useful:
• BMD records are indexed by Superintendent Registrar's Districts (SRDs), originally known as Poor Law Unions (PLUs), which in many cases straddle county boundaries
  
• PLUs are subdivided into Registrar's Districts, also known as Dispensary Districts
• Dispensary Districts are subdivided into District Electoral Divisions (DEDs)
• DEDs are subdivided into townlands (our ancestors' equivalent of Eircodes)
• official townland name spellings and boundaries were standardised by Ordnance Survey Ireland in the mid-1800s, but variant spellings and boundaries and alternative names continue in local use
  
• census records are indexed by DEDs and townlands
• online townland indexes give the PLU for each townland
• interactive online maps show townland (and irrelevant parish and barony) boundaries
  
• online census returns give the DED for each townland
• static online maps (NE, NW, SE, SW) give the Dispensary District for each DED
• Once the relevant official townland for the relevant home (or church or hospital) is identified, check the DED, Dispensary District and PLU before continuing the search.

Names

• Names in Ireland were spoken and written in three languages
  • in Irish by the ordinary people;
  • in Latin by the church authorities;
  • in English by the civil authorities.
• There were no computers insisting on consistent spelling of names before the late 20th century.
• Different anglicisations of Irish surnames should not be singled out as "real" or "correct" or "an error" or "wrong spellings".
• Names from one language are often replaced with similar sounding names from another language:
• Waldron as I spell it is the name of a family from England who were planted in County Cavan as part of the Ulster Plantation in 1609;
• the Irish surnames Mac Bhaildrín and de Bhaldraithe in nearby Counties Mayo and Roscommon appear to have become Waldron some time later.
  
• M', Mc, Mac, O' prefixes (often dropped when names were anglicised in the 19th century, but often restored in the 20th century) indicate Gaelic surnames.
• Matheson's 1901 Varieties and synonymes of surnames and Christian names in Ireland : for the guidance of registration officers and the public in searching the indexes of births, deaths, and marriages gives a wonderful collection of examples of variations
• These spelling variations in Christian names (first names) and surnames (last names) are inevitable due to:
• evolution of language
• anglicisation: Nóra/ Norah/ Nora/ Honora/ Hanora/ Hanoria/ Hanna/ Hannah/ Hanah/ Anna/ Ann/ Anne/ Johanna/ Josie/ Josephine/ Siobhán/ Susan/ Judy/ Judith/ Julia/ Sheila/ Síle
• nicknames, e.g. Paddy for Patrick, Peg and sometimes Daisy for Margaret, Delia for Bridget, Jack for John, Lillie/Lily for Elizabeth, Thady for Timothy, Darby for Jeremiah, Minnie or Molly for Mary, etc.
• poor handwriting
• Registrars were usually doctors, with stereotypically bad handwriting, e.g. the only Carol who died in Kilrush PLU from 1864 to 1971 (reputed to be related to the registrar)
  
• illiteracy
• present-day transcribers from foreign cultures
• two continents separated by a common language: Mahoney, Costello, Doherty, O'Dea/O'Day, etc.
• the Ellis Island myth
• Middle names did not exist in ordinary Catholic Ireland; migrants to the U.S. frequently turned a patronymic into a middle name to conform.

• Use wildcards (*) in online searches to account for common spelling variations.
• The asterix generally matches zero or more non-space characters in the name.
• Different websites can have slightly different conventions for wildcard usage.
  
• O and Mc/Mac names are sometimes recorded with a space or apostrophe after the prefix, sometimes without, and sometimes without the prefix entirely, so up to three different searches may be required (e.g. ODea, O'Dea, Dea).

Dates

• Most of our ancestors neither remembered, nor knew, nor cared when they were born
• My greatgreataunt wrote to her son in America from Cartoonbaun, County Mayo, on 6 June 1888:

  you wanted to know about your age as near as I could guess about 37 years last March ...
  if you want exact age I will go to the parish priest (before) the next letter but he was going about to every house to get their address to send him some money for his new chapel ...
  your loving mother until death

• Even if they did know their birthdate, our ancestors did not have pocket calculators to work out their current age, and, like many of their present-day descendants, may have lacked the mental arithmetic skills to do so without a calculator.
• Birth year may not equal current year minus current age.
  
• Ages didn't matter until 1909 when the Old Age Pension was introduced.
• Birthdays didn't matter until Hallmark Cards was founded the following year.
• Babies were baptised as soon as possible after birth to avoid eternity in limbo.
• There has always been a ‘register within three months requirement’ for births.
• Despite this, parents were never in the same rush to register births with the civil authorities, so dates on civil birth records are often wrong.
• In the Department of Social Welfare (now Social Protection), where the baptism date preceded the registered birth date, inspectors were advised to accept the former. “Baptism was the priority for baby Paddy or Bridget Murphy, lest they end up in Limbo.” When the parent finally got round to the civil end, several fair days later, in order to avoid the hassle of a statutory declaration (and to evade a fee to the Commissioner for Oaths), the birth date would be “adjusted” within the 3 months parameter.
• The informant may even have simply already forgotten the precise birthdate by the time of registration.
  

Supplementary public records

• Other sources are required:
• before 1864
• when there was non-compliance with civil registration or census
• when records have been lost in transcription or mis-indexed
• Church records are a good subsitute for BMD records

• Catholic records:
• record-keeping was difficult under the penal laws before Catholic Emancipation in 1829
• many older registers have not survived, even after 1829
• require knowledge of relevant parish boundaries
  
• Catholic parish boundaries and civil (Anglican) parish boundaries have diverged since the Reformation
• there is a temptation to conclude that a record relating to a person from a parish with surviving records relates to a completely different namesake from a parish with no surviving records
• baptism and marriage registers were always kept, but funeral and burial registers were rarely kept before the mid-20th century
• most (but not all) pre-1880 registers (and some later registers) were microfilmed many years ago and digitised and placed online on 8 Jul 2015
• many parishes which were united in 1829 regained their independence during the subsequent devotional revolution, only to be reunited again today
  
• links:
• digitised microfilms (not searchable)
• rootsireland.ie (subscription required, only partial coverage)
• irishgenealogy.ie (only partial coverage)
  
• ancestry.com (registration or subscription may be required)
• findmypast.ie baptisms, marriages and burials (registration or subscription may be required)
• johngrenham.com (lists of what has and has not been microfilmed, county by county, e.g. Clare)
• Church of Ireland records (United Church of England and Ireland from 1801 to 1869, now a member of the Anglican Communion)
• Other denominations may also be found at rootsireland.ie

• Land records are a good substitute for census records, at least for heads of households
• Tithe Applotment Books 1823-1837
• Griffith's Valuation 1847-1864
• complete with Modern and Contemporary (but undated) Maps
  
• As these records were not compiled on a single fixed date, people who moved around may be counted twice or may be completely missing.
• The Valuation Office (absorbed into Tailte Éireann under Tailte Éireann Act 2022) has offline updates of Griffith's Valuation up to the 1970s.
• A change of occupier is often a good clue as to the date of death of the former occupier or the date of marriage of the new occupier.
• My own photographs of Valuation Office records for a few areas.

• There are numerous other national sources, documented for example in John Grenham's Tracing Your Irish Ancestors (5th ed., 2019)

• The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is an attempt, a century later, to collect copies of original records lost when the Four Courts and Public Records Office of Ireland were destroyed during the Civil War, e.g.
• 1821-1851 census returns
• Church of Ireland parish registers
• wills proved in the Principal Registry in Dublin
  

• Many County Libraries provide excellent local sources, e.g.
• Clare
• Cork
  
• Limerick
• Tipperary
  
• Waterford
  

DNA

• Autosomal DNA
• inherited equally from both parents and on average equally from each grandparent, from each greatgrandparent, etc.
• Autosomal DNA matching is provided by numerous companies:
• spit for AncestryDNA (GBP79), 23andMe (EUR109)
  
• copy your data from their websites to MyHeritage.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com, GEDmatch,com, LivingDNA.com, etc.
• "fish in all the gene pools"
• If you have living parents or grandparents, ask them to spit as you have only 1/2 or 1/4 of their autosomal DNA.
  
• Y-DNA
• inherited by men only from their fathers, like their surname in most Western cultures
• Y-DNA matching and surname projects are provided by FamilyTreeDNA.com (USD379)
• mitochondrial DNA
• inherited by everyone from their mothers
• surname typically changes with every generation
  
• mtDNA matching is also provided by FamilyTreeDNA.com (USD119)

In 2016, AncestryDNA sponsored a Transition Year project in Colaiste Mhuire, Ballygar, County Galway. See Ballygar & Area DNA and Genealogy and Soghain Genes on Facebook.

Software and websites

It will quickly become apparent that handwritten family trees don't work very well, as they need to be rewritten every time a new discovery is made.

Editing with a computer is far more efficient and there are numerous options.

A universal standard format called GEDCOM allows data to be transferred between the different options as you experiment.

All the options have their advantages and disadvantages:

• Standalone desktop software, such as Ancestral Quest (previously Personal Ancestral File), which I have used since 1987, or RootsMagic or Reunion or Family Tree Builder or any of the numerous other programs listed on Wikipedia.
• allows complete control of your backups
• allows you to forget to make backups
• allows fast data entry with keyboard shortcuts etc.
• does not require high-speed broadband access
• requires access to your laptop for editing
• Web-based software, such as ancestry.com:
• data is stored in the cloud
• clouds evaporate (e.g. WorldConnect)
• allows easy linking to online sources for your ancestors
• allows easy linking to online sources for wrong individuals
• the ancestry.com business model
  
• encourages new users to guess anything they don't know
• resells those guesses as hints to the next wave of new users
• allows errors to go viral, replicated in duplicate profiles in the individual "trees" of 100s or 1000s of different users
• does not distinguish clearly between other customers' wrong guesses and primary sources
  
• Single online world family trees, with the objective of having just one profile for every person who has ever lived, such as
• wikitree.com
• free
• based on an Hono(u)r Code
  
• integrated with DNA websites
• emphasis on linking sources to the tree and correcting others' errors
  
• familysearch.org
• free
  
• affiliated with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
• emphasis on linking the tree to digitised sources, which spawn many duplicates
  
• geni.com
• commercial
• now owned by MyHeritage.com

All the options allow printing of a wide range of hard copy reports.

Reconciling conflicting evidence

DNA testing is not a substitute for genealogical research; rather the two approaches help to corroborate each other.

1. the oral traditions passed down through the generations and picked up from an early age;
2. the archival sources encountered later in life by traditional genealogists; and
3. the DNA evidence that often reconciles both, but sometimes refutes either or both (NPE).

• Is the description of the deceased provided by the grief-stricken informant on a death certificate oral or archival? (Estimated age at death, parents' names, mother's maiden surname, etc.)
• Are family letters and diaries oral or archival?
• Are published or unpublished family histories oral or archival? (e.g. 1991 Cosgrove-Corry by Fr. Peter Ryan at al.)

I once thought of my mother's stories as history. I thought memory was history. Then I became a historian, and after many years I have come to realize that only careless historians confuse memory and history. History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed. Few non-historians realize how many scraps a life leaves. These scraps do not necessarily form a story in and of themselves, but they are always calling stories into doubt, always challenging memories, always trailing off into forgotten places.