Luck of the Irish

You may have heard that all Irish genealogy records burned in a 1922 courthouse fire. But that’s mostly just a tale, based on an unfortunate event during Ireland’s Civil War. Still, it morphed into received wisdom that researching ancestors from Ireland is a fruitless exercise.

Although it still gets the occasional airing, it’s a lot less prevalent these days. Over the years, it’s been responsible for many a would-be researcher giving up on learning about their Irish heritage. But we’ll have none of that defeatist attitude here.

Irish researchers face challenges—there’s no point pretending otherwise. But that’s the case with research in any unfamiliar country. Non-native genealogists confront unrecognizable words and geography, different methods of recording information, and long centuries of historical events that have complicated the collection and preservation of records.

I can’t promise you an easy ride with Irish research, but at least there are no major language barriers. (Most records were kept in English.) Even the Latin you might encounter in Catholic records requires just a quick lesson to decipher (see <www.irish-genealogy-toolkit.com/latin-irish-parish-registers.html>).

It might take some practice to pronounce some tongue-twisting place names—let’s hear it for Muckanaghederdauhaulia and Dún Laoghaire—but you’ll catch on!

Let’s walk through the basics of Irish genealogy: the island’s history and geography, common Irish research pitfalls, and the best records for tracing your ancestors from the Emerald Isle.

HISTORY, HISTORY, HISTORY

The first step to understanding your Irish ancestors is learning about the social and political issues of the era that led your ancestor to leave all that was familiar and take the often-perilous journey from Ireland to North America. The reasons for migration were different over the centuries, but nearly all of them included a desire to escape poverty or