Collins Tracing Your Irish Family History. Ryan Tubridy

search. The next step is to seek Thomas’s birth: if his father’s name matches the one given on his marriage record, you’ll know you have the right document.

      A major problem in seeking births is when you have very common combinations of names, leaving a long list of possible entries. This can sometimes be overcome by building up a picture of all families of the surname in the area, using civil registration and religious registers, thus eliminating false possibilities. Where possible, gain extra co-ordinates on ages from census returns.

      Try to confirm the names of both parties (i.e. from a birth certificate) before seeking marriage records. You can then work back from when the eldest known child of the couple was born (beware that a census may list all the children of a father, but won’t let on that half of them were by his present wife, and the other half by a previous, now deceased spouse: a significant gap in children’s ages may alert you to this). Choose the least common surname or combination of names, and whenever you find an instance of it, look for the other party’s name in the index: if the other details (district, volume and page number) match up, it’s yours.

      Occupations could change. If the father on a 1950 marriage certificate was a factory manager, and on a 1922 birth certificate was a junior clerk, you can see that the clerk could have been promoted to factory manager. If, however, you find an implausible jump from, say, army officer to fishmonger, then you may have the wrong certificate, and should widen your search for better possibilities. Only when you’re sure you’ve found the right document should you continue working backwards.

      Death certificates vary in use from country to country. Those in Ireland just give the age and place of death. This is useful if you are stuck – it will suggest when the person was born, if you can’t (say) find their marriage record. It’s good to seek these records to complete your ancestors’ stories anyway, and it’s helpful to confirm that someone who you think was your ancestor died after their child was born, not some years before! Countries such as Scotland and New Zealand have much more detailed death certificates including both parents’ full names, making them fantastic tools that should be sought as a matter of course. Just bear in mind that names of the deceased’s parents as supplied by their children may not be accurate, for the informants may never have met their grandparents. But only disbelieve what you read if you have firm evidence to the contrary.

      Deaths can be hard to find without knowing when the event took place. It’s often easier to gain further co-ordinates: marriage entries sometimes state that a father was deceased, for example. Will indexes provide a short-cut for better-off families. In Ireland, Griffith’s Valuation (see p. 84) for any landholder, however small, can give a good idea when someone may have died.

      If civil registration reaches back to your migrant ancestor, then the earliest documents will actually name people living in Ireland. For example, if your migrant ancestor married after having already migrated, then the father’s/parents’ names on the marriage certificate will be those of people back in Ireland. The same applies to parents’ names on a migrant’s death certificate. Of course, the parents may have migrated too, so you can always seek their deaths in the country of arrival too, just in case!

      Censuses

      The quality and quantity of censuses vary greatly from country to country. Generally, they list the occupants of a country on a specific day. Compiled by place, listing each household in turn, they give varying degrees of information about each person: at best they state names, ages, interrelationships, occupations and places of birth (and, in the United States, for example, the countries of origin of each person’s parents). They are best used in tandem with civil registration. Censuses indicate ages and places to seek birth certificates. These in turn supply the names of parents, who can be sought in earlier censuses.

      Census returns for migrant ancestors may confirm ‘Ireland’ as their birth place, and they may give a county or even an exact place. You will often find other Irish people living nearby, with whom your ancestor may have migrated, who could well be close relations. You could actually find several generations born and bred in Ireland living in the same place.

      Many countries’ censuses, including Ireland’s, are now partially online and can be found through www.censusfinder.com.

      Problems are often lessened simply by being aware of them. Sometimes, places of origin were not given accurately. Famine migrants were so scared of repatriation that they would tell census enumerators that they were born ‘here!’. Equally, when they admitted to being Irish, the enumerators often simply wrote ‘Ireland’, never imagining that we’d want to know more detail. In both cases, seek your ancestor in all available censuses, for some will list more accurate or detailed answers than others.

      Migrants sometimes assumed nobody would have heard of their tiny townland of origin, so gave their birthplace as the nearest market town instead. When they did give a precise birthplace, such as a farm, you may have quite a time locating it, especially if its name appears on modern maps under a different spelling, or a translation into or out of Gaelic. You may need to try your own translation and see if that appears on maps instead.

      Much Irish migration was a two-stage process – to Argentina via England, New Zealand via Australia, or the United States via Canada. Always bear this in mind and work back patiently, finding out the most common migratory patterns for the period and country concerned.

      Directories

      Directories started in England in 1677 as lists of prominent merchants but rapidly spread abroad, proliferating in the 19th century and flourishing until the spread of telephone directories after World War II. They generally listed tradesmen, craftsmen, merchants, professionals, farmers, clergy, gentry and nobility, but as time passed, coverage grew broader. From the mid-19th century onwards, they usually comprised four sections: Commercial (tradesmen and professionals listed alphabetically), Trades (individual alphabetical lists for each trade or profession), Streets (tradesmen and private residents listed house by house) and Court (originally the heads of wealthier households, but this rapidly became an alphabetical listing of the heads of all families save the poor). They provide a snapshot of the communities in which ancestors lived, including useful historical sketches and descriptions of the places concerned. By searching a series of directories, you can work out when ancestors lived and died. Bear in mind, though, that directories were usually printed a year or so after the data had been collected, so were always slightly out of date. Directories also provide addresses for manual census searches.

      Religious registers

      Religious registers are also called church registers and parish registers. Parishes were fixed geographical units, in which priests kept registers. However, registers were also kept by priests on the move – on wagon trains crossing 19th-century America, or moving furtively amongst scattered communities of persecuted Catholics in 17th-century England.

      Some denominations recorded births, but you will generally find baptisms, marriages and burials. The records are often slightly less detailed than Civil Registration, but not always – many Catholic and Quaker registers, for example, can sometimes be even more informative. They can be used in a similar way to Civil Records. Many people start using them for the period before Civil Records. Actually, there are cases where it is sensible to seek both types of record. An Irish civil marriage, for example, will state the father’s name, whereas the corresponding Catholic one may give the mother’s too.

      Baptism records usually state the child’s name, date of baptism, father’s name and mother’s forename. You may get less (16th-century English baptisms sometimes omit parents’ names altogether) or more, such as date of birth, father’s occupation and mother’s maiden name. It’s worth finding out what information registers are likely to contain before searching them, to ensure the level of detail matches your needs.

      Especially with Catholic records, baptisms will give the names of the godparents (also called ‘gossips’ or ‘sponsors’). These were people undertaking to look after the child’s physical and spiritual needs should the parents die. Sometimes, they might be