Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet by Chris Paton

Author:Chris Paton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REFERENCE / Genealogy and Heraldry
ISBN: 9781783400706
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2013-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Digitised street directories are increasingly being made available online.

Additional transcribed directories for Clare, Galway, Limerick, Mayo and Roscommon can be found at http://celticcousins.net/ireland, while several directories for the Waterford area from 1824, 1839, 1846, 1856, 1877, 1881, 1894 and 1909–1910 are available in a database that can be searched at www.waterfordcountylibrary.ie/en/familyhistory/tradedirectories/. These also contain some records for Kilkenny, Tipperary, and the south east of Ireland. For Clare, visit www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/genealogy/genealog.htm for offerings from 1788 to 1893.

Several other directories can be accessed via the Census Finder website at www.censusfinder.com/ireland or via The Irish Archives at www.theirisharchives.com/categories/view/37/Directories. An all-Ireland directory from 1862 is at www.libraryireland.com/Genealogy.php, while additional resources can be found via sites such as Fáilte Romhat (www.failteromhat.com), Irish Family Research (www.irishfamilyresearch.co.uk) and Ancestry Ireland (www.ancestryireland.com/database.php). Don’t forget to consult Google Books (http://books.google.ie or http://books.google.co.uk), where you will find free to view copies of directories such as Thom’s Directory of Ireland from 1850 and Slater’s National Directory from 1846.

Ancestry has very little street directory material for Ireland (an exception being Thom’s Directory from 1904), though there are some other interesting inclusions. The site’s ‘U.K. and U.S. Directories, 1680–1830’ collection is mentioned on the list of directories within the platform’s Northern Ireland section, though its main Irish contribution actually seems to be a collection of 157 subscription lists for publications printed in Dublin in the eighteenth century. A few listings from some early nineteenth-century commercial directories are also included. The vendor is somewhat geographically challenged with its separate ‘U.K., City and County Directories, 1600s–1900s’ collection, however, as this appears to only contain records from Britain.

Where Ancestry really does excel, however, is with an extensive collection of phone directories within its ‘British Phone Books 1880–1984’ collection. This contains a directory for Dublin from 1880, all-Ireland directories from 1896 and regularly from 1900–1911 up to Partition, a directory for Belfast, Dublin and Cork from 1920, and from 1922 onwards a very good run of volumes for Northern Ireland.

Another exciting project from Ancestry, currently under way at the time of writing, is the conservation, digitisation and indexing of ‘Lord Viscount Morpeth’s Testimonial Roll’, a major resource from 1841 which will act as an impressive census substitute when it goes online in 2013. The roll, dedicated as ‘The Address of the Nobility, Gentry, Clergy, Merchants, Traders & the People of Ireland’, is a 412-metre-long testimonial which records the names of some 250,000 people who signed the document to mark the departure of Yorkshire-born aristocrat George Howard, Lord Morpeth, as the Chief Secretary for Ireland. The document was presented to him at a ceremony in Dublin and then packed into a mahogany box and sent to his family home, Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. It remained in the castle’s archive until 2009, at which point it was sent for conservation to the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, with whom Ancestry has been collaborating on the project.

Following on from street directories, another regular collection created annually is that of freeholders’ records and poll books showing who was entitled to vote, as well as later electoral registers.

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