GETTING STARTED IN 2008, PART 2

by Paul Gorry

 

In the first article in this series a number of points were made about beginning family history research. Maybe this is a good time to recap...

 

Don’t start with the Internet. Get basic information (names, dates, locations and occupations) from family members. Gather up whatever records may be at hand (certificates, memorial cards, photographs, etc.). Choose one line of ancestry to follow at the beginning. Take a fairly definite piece of information, confirm it, and use it as a foundation on which to build. Always work back in time, generation by generation. Don’t ignore the intermediate steps to jump into the unknown. Always search indexes for variant spellings and always treat ages as approximations till you find a record confirming them. Finally, don’t expect to make great strides in your initial research trips.

 

If you are about to venture off on your first research trip you may be unsure of where to start. If you live outside Ireland you will have a geographical disadvantage, but you will have the added problem of having to establish the identity of your emigrant ancestor before progressing to Irish records. Dealing with genealogical records from the ancestor’s country of destination is beyond the scope of this article. The important point is that the records of the destination country cannot be bypassed.

 

It should be remembered too that you need to know more about your emigrant than his or her name and an approximate birth date. Arriving to Dublin expecting to find record of Kate McDonagh who was born somewhere in Ireland about 1850 is wishful thinking. The very basic amount of information you would need is the name of one of the emigrant’s parents and, if the emigrant was born before 1864, the part of Ireland from which they came. If the name is a particularly common one, such as Kate McDonagh, the basics are not enough. Equipping yourself with much more than the bare bones would be ideal. Very often people emigrated with or to join siblings or cousins. Building up information on the emigrant’s relatives may be the key to finding the family’s place of origin in Ireland. 

 

Many imagine that the search in Irish records begins with knocking on the door of the relevant parish priest or minister or, worse still, writing to them. Please don’t! For one thing it’s rarely necessary. For another, the clergy are generally over-stretched and are not at leisure to supervise or conduct church register searches. An important point to grasp in relation to Ireland is that most genealogical records are not accessible in the town or parish from which your ancestor originated. So the town or parish should be your destination after you have looked at records elsewhere. A limited range of records may be accessed through county libraries, but these relate only to the specific county. The good news is that most genealogical records may be searched in institutions that are within walking distance of one another in Dublin city centre, or at one of two locations in Belfast. Therefore, you should start with these centralised records.

 

Which records to start with would depend on the ancestor (emigrant or otherwise) with whom you begin. The period in which he or she was born would have a bearing on the starting point, as well perhaps as their geographical, social and religious background. Let’s assume that you are beginning with someone who was born or married in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In such a case you would most likely start with either the 1901 and 1911 Census returns or the civil records of births, deaths and marriages. In most cases you would need to know exactly where the family lived in order to access the census returns, so the civil records are a more likely starting point.

 

If your ancestors came from one of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland you may wonder where the relevant civil records of birth, death and marriage are located. Northern Ireland did not exist prior to 1922, so the entire island was one administrative unit before that time. After 1922 the civil records for what is now the Republic of Ireland continued to be under the General Register Office in Dublin, while those for Northern Ireland came under the new General Register Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.

 

Let’s concentrate on the General Register Office (GRO) research facility in Dublin, as it concerns all of Ireland prior to 1922 and most of it thereafter. The GRO itself was transferred to Roscommon a few years ago but its research room remained in Dublin. In late 2007 it moved from Joyce House in Lombard Street East to its present location on the third floor of Block 7 in the Irish Life Centre, Lower Abbey Street. Your biggest challenge on your first visit will be finding the place. The best attempt at directions would be to say that it’s half way between the fountain in the plaza and the Irish Life Mall.

 

The new research room is much bigger than the old one but it gets busy, so being there when the door opens at 9.30am is a good strategy. Beginners are usually a bit wary of stepping into a record repository for the first time. Remember that you are as entitled as everyone else to be in the GRO research room. You don’t need a ticket or a reader’s card, the staff are friendly and helpful, and most of the other customers are too.

 

You pay a fee to search the annual indexes of births, deaths or marriages. If you find an index entry that may be relevant you pay to get a photocopy of the actual record to which it refers. Irish death records provide little genealogical information, so ignore them completely until you become more experienced. Birth records provide useful information, but marriage records are more informative, and relevant marriages can be identified in the indexes with more precision because they are indexed under the names of both parties. So, the ideal starting point is a search for the marriage of a couple. Incidentally, 1864 is the date from which all births, deaths and marriages in Ireland were subject to civil registration, but the process began in 1845 with registration of non-Catholic marriages.

 

There are two types of search fees at the GRO – general and specific. For a beginner the general search fee is a waste of money. A specific search allows you access to the annual indexes of five consecutive years for €2. You should start with the Index of Marriages for the five years immediately before the birth date of the couple’s eldest known child. To be on the safe side, allow for that child being a little younger than you expect. So let’s say Thomas Rafter married Kate McDonagh and their eldest child was supposedly born in 1918. Search the Index of Marriages for the years 1915-1919. If you don’t find them you will have to invest another €2 in the preceding five years, but at least you will have allowed for a margin of error in your initial information.

 

The first thing to note about the indexes is the format. They are alphabetical listings of individuals (male and female combined) covering the entire country. For that reason it’s not essential to know where Thomas and Kate might have married but, of course, that would help. Each index entry contains five elements – the surname, forename(s), Superintendent Registrar’s District (SRD), volume number and page number. For example;

There are several SRDs in Co. Cork. The SRD in this instance covers Cork City and its immediate environs.

 

It is vital that you note that each volume from 1878 forward contains more than one alphabetical listing because the indexes are divided into quarters (i.e., the quarters of the year ending on the last days of March, June, September and December). So instead of one index per year you have four to search. That can easily be overlooked.

 

It is likely that there would be less index entries of the name Thomas Rafter than of Kate McDonagh, so looking under his name first would be a good idea. Remember the advice given above: ‘always search indexes for variant spellings’. Thomas Rafter is unlikely to have variations. On the other hand, you would need to look out for variations of McDonagh (e.g., McDonough) and then check them for Kate, Catherine and Katherine references.

 

If you find a Thomas Rafter entry you need to check the index for the same quarter for Kate McDonagh (and variants). If you find a matching entry, that is, one with the same SRD, volume and page numbers, it is very likely that you have found the right couple. The only way of finding out is to pay €4 for a photocopy of the marriage record. Don’t waste your money on entries that don’t fully match.

 

When you get your photocopy it should reveal the exact date and place of marriage, the bride and groom’s stated ages, previous marital status, occupations, addresses, fathers’ names and fathers’ occupations, along with the witnesses’ names. The stated age will most likely be either ‘full age’ or ‘minor’, meaning over or under 21 years old. Less frequently a specific age will appear, but remember the advice above: ‘always treat ages as approximations till you find a record confirming them’.

 

Getting a piece of information will make you hungry for more, but resist the temptation to start searching for Thomas and Kate’s birth records there and then. You need to know more about them before looking for such records.

 

Finally, is there an alternative to physically going to the GRO? Yes. If you are close to an outlet of the Family History Library (the Salt Lake City repository run by the Mormon Church) you will have a potential point of access to microfilm copies of the GRO indexes. The problem is that in smaller outlets they have to be ordered out from Salt Lake City. Outlets with a high usage of Irish records (such as the Gilbert Library in Dublin or the LDS in Hyde Park, London) have them on permanent loan, and they can be searched for free.