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Genealogical research in Ireland is different from England

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Genealogical Research in Ireland www.tree-sleuths.co.uk I was inspired to write this blog post because of the amount of time I had spent struggling to understand what makes Irish genealogical research different from English research. I hope that it will help you spend less time stumbling around! This post is not  intended to be a substitute for studying books and websites in order to learn more about the place and its records. Consider it to be a starting point instead. History Irish history can be a polarising subject simply because of its nature. For this reason I will not go into it in any great detail here. If you wish to know more, a good introduction is  Gibney's book in the bibliography. Here's a short summary relevant to genealogy.  The British invaded and occupied Ireland, just as the Normans and Romans invaded and occupied England. This took place, with varying degrees of violence according to the historical records, over periods of centuries. Certain British (well, E
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Free Genealogy Data

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Finding Free Genealogy Records www.tree-sleuths.co.uk This blog post continues from my earlier post Using FamilySearch . In this post I will introduce you to a selection of free data websites where you can find genealogical information about individual people: things like records of births marriages and deaths. These websites focus on Great Britain and Ireland. These resources are all categorised as Data (D) [1].  Records from England and Wales General Register Office This is the natural place to start, if only because it sits at the centre of the spider’s web: the England and Wales General Register Office (GRO). Although mainly an administrative arm of government serving other government functions, it has data for you. Its website is www.gro.gov.uk (D). The website hosts searchable indexes of birth and death (not marriage) registers for England and Wales created from the full copy registers the GRO holds. Although there are gap years, the indexes are very useful because births show th
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Using FamilySearch

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How to make good use of FamilySearch  www.tree-sleuths.co.uk This is a blog about using FamilySearch, the free to use online genealogy website created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) which is at www.familysearch.org . Everybody who pursues genealogical research will, at one time or another, have heard of FamilySearch. Many of them dismiss it out of hand, and consequently miss out on the real treasure it holds. There are no two ways about it, this is a colossal website. It can be quite intimidating to use on first seeing it; some people just keep to the (small) part they know and never discover some of the valuable information to be found there. In a nutshell, what is FamilySearch? FamilySearch is several things rolled into one. It is (1) an underlying archive of images original records and other resources, which have been used to create (2) a database of searchable derived records which in turn have been used together to create (3) a single huge family tree. Si
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1921 England & Wales Census - some tips and tricks

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 The 1921 England & Wales census - some tips and tricks A page from a 1921 census return - original image from The National Archives in Class RG15 Today, early 2022, the only public access available to see returns from the 1921 census is through FindMyPast. This access is charged on a pay per view basis (unless you use FindMyPast on computers based at The National Archives and a couple of other locations, in which case access is free). FindMyPast provides a search engine allowing you to search on more than 35 different fields. You may think this should make it easy to find any record, but the number of fields available can instead lead you to over-search and get no results. First, the bad news. This searchable index is chock full of transcription errors. Remember, what you are doing when you search is scouring the index that the FindMyPast website makes available to you; this index was created by transcribing the contents of all of the census returns and entering this data into a c
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