Ireland Research Hopes Revisited

My turn to blog is a wee bit after St Patrick's Day but the thought of researching the Irish ancestors is not bound by time.

My Irish quest has been begging to start for years. Recently due to a DNA find, I have been sent on a new Irish quest when an O'Toole turned up as an ancient DNA match for our Langley DNA project.
I have felt intimidated by the challenge of delving into the films on FamilySearch or Ireland, and just trying to sort out all the Michaels, Williams, and Margrets that I see when I go to FindMyPast or other Irish sites...words escape me. One thing I do know and follow is...the obvious search for our ancestors begins with a name, and, if you have it, a place. On the Hero's and my mom's side of the family there are many Irish names to look for.
There are some blogs and websites that specialize in Ireland research
Smallest Leaf is one of those. She has so much Irish information and many books listed on her blog. It is wonderful to stop by and browse. Click here to see her blog.
Another site I really like it Irish Genealogy Tool Kit.
I like these because I need someone to give me direction. I am so ingrained in United States research it will take some shift in my paradigms to hopefully finds some success in venturing into Ireland research.
What I have done so far...
I started making a note of all the names I was looking for, variants of the names, and places the names were found.  An example for the is : A Rootsweb site for Researching Irish Names. I searched for Magill from my mom's ancestors. They were adamant in the 1830's per a letter written by John Magill that their family was the only ones who spelled it that way.
"...I have been particular so that you may know if you meet with any person of the name of Magill you can tell whether they are your relation. I have seen several from Ireland that are no kin of mine. They spell their name McGill. They are generally native Irish and Roman Catholic. I recollect to have seen my grandfather's certificate from Ireland dated 1725. It was spelled Magill and all his descendants spell their names the same way. Any who do not are not of our kindred..."  Click here to read the rest of the transcribed letter.
My finding:
MacGiolla ancient of Magill,
Gill,
McGill
Turning to my Hero's Irish ancestors, I was able to glean the following for his known surnames.
Death certificates helped with clues as to where the places were correct.

O'Shaughnessy      
Sandys
FURLONG              Wexford
FURLONG              Wicklow
O'AHERN,               Cork
O'Echtighearn  
Ahern
O'DWYER              Tipperary
Dwyer                      Lemerick
Dyer                         Sligo
O'Breen  
O'Brien

I have toyed with learning Gaelic, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
Besides knowing the surname, I discovered that the old Irish had a naming pattern. Most but not all used it. The Irish Tool Kit website points out that in the 1700s and 1800s those that immigrated to America did use this...making it hard to sort out the descendants when 5 brother, in the same area named their sons in the same pattern (true experience). I have posted on the naming patterns before click here to read the post then click back to return.

I have ascribed to the method of looking to others who have already done research reading how to find records in Ireland, talking to people who have UK experience in searching, and utilizing the free course on FamilySearch.org. I take the time to watch videos by those who have done the walk such as David Rencher's videos Tips for Researching your Irish Ancestors. I HAVE to mention the FamilySearch.org's Irish Collection which includes images... Ireland Historical Records.

There is something so exciting in searching for families that have been apart for years and reuniting them. I love genealogy research and have been excited to share how to research and source with the upcoming generation to get them involved in their history to know their ancestors. So Far, it has been a positive experience for both generations. 😉

Starting out with a computer package – tips I wish I’d been given

I started using a package in 2013 and it was really exciting, just putting in a few facts and having a tree grow on the screen in front of my eyes, five generations ranging from my son to my great-grandmother in a matter of minutes, just like that.  Get me, amateur genealogist!

But later when I went back to that initial information I wished I’d done a few things differently, so thought I would share those things with you. Some of these apply in principle to any record keeping, others are more specific.

Starting out with your tree [Image from FamilyTreeMaker2012]

Get your timings right

In the excitement of entering data and building a tree don’t race ahead – when I first started using a genealogy programme I would put the year of a specific event and the fact, just so the tree would be as big as possible.  Bad plan.  While census entry dates are easy to check on, eg using Genuki, dates things like baptisms can be a faff to find again and without the precise dates you may be wasting your time, perhaps looking for a census entry in April when that person actually died in February.

Note all you know

So your ancestor lived with her six brothers and sisters? When using census returns don’t just enter the data on your ancestor, put in all the information relating to every family member into their own individual Person profile: estimated DOB, birth town, occupation. I've found that later on this has been useful, eg discovering someone I’d feared had died in childhood was actually living with a married aunt.

Note what you need

I've found it really useful customising my tasks within Family Tree Maker. Recently I've added my own categories specific to counties, specific to resources and specific to actions.

For example I could select my Cornwall, Visit & Photograph and Check with Council categories. This will filter tasks to respectively let me search for a clump of Cornish records on one online resource, plan a trip to see what my great-grandmother would have seen as she ran along her street, and to pop all enquiries relating to a particular cemetery into one email and not have to trouble a helpful but very busy Council employee several times.

Avoid horror and nausea

Always, always, make sure your information is backed up. The feeling of losing data is nauseating, like realising you've accidentally overspent by using the wrong debit card.  And indeed it would be an expensive mistake, all those years of subscriptions wasted, money down the drain. In addition to uploading my Family Tree Maker tree to Ancestry I use Outlook Cloud to upload a copy of my entire FTM tree file as back-up.  I use Outlook because my main email account is my Hotmail one but, as they say, other products are available.  I also upload my e-copies of original census returns downloaded from various sites.

I hope some of these will be helpful. And now I'm off to back up my family tree; after recommending it to you I'm feeling guilty for not doing it myself for a couple of months...

Text copyright Lynne Black 21 June 2015

First published on World Genealogy Collaboration blog site: http://worldwidegenealogy.blogspot.com/2015/06/CompGeneTips.html