Author name: Ruth Blair

National Library of Ireland Databases

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Have you visited the National Library of Ireland’s website recently? They have a lot of information available on their website to help the family historian.

The first is their page on doing family history research at the National Library of Ireland. Here you can download a PDF file to help you get started. The file is two pages and gives brief descriptions of civil, church, census and land and property records. There is a list of useful addresses to further your research.

On this page you will find a link to a description of the Genealogy Advisory Service which is free to all those who go to the library.

There is a searchable online catalogue and if you are lucky you may find some digitzed items in the results. You can narrow your search to just digitized items but you may miss out on something important.

Sources Database is the online version of Hayes Manuscript. I discussed this database in a blog posting entitled “Hayes Manuscript now Online at the National Library of Ireland.”

The Newspaper Database is a searchable database to find newspapers available at the library by either publication name or by publication town/city or county. You can chose to include titles from the Newsplan Project which are not held by the National Library of Ireland.

Manuscript Collection Lists provides a detailed listing for the contents of the manuscript collections. You can search by the following categories: business, cartographic, estate, family, Gaelic, literary, military, personal and political. You can browse the records by these categories as well.

Photographic Databases include: The Lawrence Collection, The Clonbrock Collection, The O’Dea Collection and The Poole Collection. This past St. Patrick’s Day Ancestry announced that they had the Lawrence Collection. You can view it for free here. Searches can be done by county, description keyword and location keyword.

The Clonbrock Collection can be searched by title, subject and year. The O’Dea Collection can be searched by county, location, description, date and subject. The Poole Collection can be searched by subject and year. There are some more specific search criteria but these will be the ones used by most family historians.

The Digital Photographs Database has eight collections: Clarke Collection; Eason Collection; Independent H Collection; Lawrence Royal & Cabinet Collections; Keogh Collection; Poole Whole Plate Collection; Stereo Pair Collection and the Tempest Collection.

I found the Stereo Pair Collection fun to go through. They were meant to be viewed in a stereoscope where you would get a 3D image of the photograph. The years covered are 1860-1890.

There was one of the Little Sugar Loaf in Wicklow that brought back memories. We used to climb the Little and Great Sugar Loaf mountains and have a picnic near the top. They were called Sugar Loaf because they looked like a loaf of sugar. You used to get sugar in a conical shape and shave off the amount you needed. You have the ability to order a digital copy of the images.

Why not go in and have a little fun at the National Library of Ireland today. You do not have to travel to Ireland to do it!

©2011 – Blair Archival Research

Twelve Months of Genealogy – April

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Easter is the big celebration in April this year so let’s see what family information we can gather around this celebration. April 25th is ANZAC Day a day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand.

In the first week of April we will start with the religious denominations of your family. In my family there are Presbyterian, Church of Ireland, Church of England, Church of Scotland, Free Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic, Quaker and Huguenot (French Protestant).

What were the religious denominations in your family? Do you know the history of that religion? What sacraments, celebrations, customs, hymns, ideologies, and other things are part of that religion? What was an average religious service like? What records are available for that religion that can help you with your family history?

The second week of April find out what church records may have been missed or ignored during research. When you research church records is it strictly parish registers? Have you ever looked at the church minutes, vestry records or Kirk session records? Have you read old issues of the church bulletin, magazine, newsletter or other church publication? Do you know the history of the church your family attended?

These records can hold a wealth of information on your family. Especially if they were active in the operations of the church, provided the church with funding or went against church rules.

You may find people of other denominations baptizing their children, getting married or buried in a church of another religious denomination. It would depend on what church was local to them and how difficult it would be to get to the church of their faith.

The third week of April is Easter. How did your family celebrate this holiday? What were the religious activities like during this time? Did you get new clothes? What were they like? Was there an Easter egg hunt or other tradition that involved the children?

What was your Easter meal like? Was there something special served that signified Easter? When did you have the big celebration in the family Good Friday, Easter Sunday or Easter Monday? Was it the immediate family or did you have a large extended family gathering?

April 25th is ANZAC (Australia & New Zealand Army Corps) Day in Australia and New Zealand. It commemorates the landing in Gallipoli in 1915. Do you have ancestors from Australia and New Zealand? Did they serve with the ANZACS? Why not spend the day seeing what you can find with regards to the members of your family who may have served their country as a member of the ANZAC. You can find out more about what is available at Coraweb.

©2011 – Blair Archival Research

Sharing Information in the Digital Age a Story of Frustration

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The first few months of this year have proved challenging for me with regards to family history information that I have shared with others. There was the tree on Ancestry that has my information linked to a family that is not related to mine in any way. I can prove this with documentation but there is nothing to be done.

Photographs that were shared with another researcher showed up on Ancestry without my knowledge. The photographs were shared with someone who was directly connected to the people in the photographs. They did not ask my permission to put my photographs online. One was attached to the wrong person. I respectfully requested that they be removed. They were and it was appreciated.

Then the photos showed up on other trees in Ancestry. They were probably copied to other researcher’s files before they were taken down. Now the problem of the photograph being attached to the wrong person is rampant throughout Ancestry’s family tree database and probably will continue throughout the internet.

Another family line was connected to a family tree where the link was minute. The two families married into the same family generations apart and were not direct lines. Still they had the family tree four generations down connected to their family tree.

When I requested the pictures to be taken down from the family trees some of the people could not understand why I would not share my information. One person said it should be online for all to find. Some got rather hostile.

If someone is found who shares a direct line I share my research. Now I only share information from the shared generation back and not forward. Sometimes I wish I knew back in the 1990s what I know now but as Maya Angelou says “You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better.”

While all this was going on Marian Pierre-Louis of Marian’s Roots and Rambles had a blog posting called “The Digital Age Discourages Sharing.” Marian discusses the fact that the internet encourages too much sharing and that if it is found on the internet then people feel that copyright does not apply. The sub topics were photos, writing, genealogy and the future. Go and read Marian’s blog posting as it is very informative and provides food for thought on the subject.

Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers has come out with a chart to help people decide whether or not to post an image. The blog post is called “Infographic – Should I Post This Image?”

The frustration for me is that it feels like people are collecting names to add to their tree to make it as big as possible. People are finding information on the internet and not examining it closely enough to make sure there really is a connection. They are not researching the records for themselves in order to prove the connection that was found on the internet really exists.

I understand the elation of finding information on the internet that seems to relate to your family. The excitement of finding distant cousins and family connections not previously known can be exhilarating. Gathering names from family trees posted on the internet is not doing family history research. In my opinion you are missing out on the best part of the research process by only focusing on the internet.

New information is being put on the internet everyday but at the same time less than 2% of all genealogical information is found online. At some point you will have to go to libraries and archives as well as purchase birth, marriage and death certificates to further your research.

The internet is a great tool, I use it everyday, but it is just a tool. To further my research I need to go to the brick and mortar repositories to find more information. Most of my brick walls are broken down with research in libraries and archives.

When I started my research in the 1970s you had to mail a letter of request and wait for a response. If payment was required you mailed that in a return letter. Then you had to wait for a response and hope that the search was successful. Finding distant relatives was not part of the process as they were difficult to locate.

In the 1980s there was the Genealogical Research Directory. You would pay to put in your names, dates and places of interest and a large book would come out each year. If you found a connection in the book you would write the person a letter and hopefully share some information.

I could not wait for the book to come out each year and went through it several times with a highlighter to make sure nothing was missed. Writing paper, envelopes and lots of stamps were purchased, not to mention International Reply Coupons. It was exciting to find a variety of envelopes in the mail box. I got quite a collection of stamps from around the world. A distant cousin in South Africa was found through this book. The family had not been in contact since both our Great Great Grandmother’s wrote to each other in the late 1800s.

In the 1990s when I started online you could use mailing lists to find people and share information but you still had to mail the information to them. It was at this time that it took one year from the time a family tree was sent to a distant cousin and another distant cousin was found who sent my own tree back to me. They did not know it had come from me in the first place. A little research showed it had been through four different people.

Now in the 2010s you can contact someone online and it is feasible that within 10 minutes or less you can have confirmation and information shared. You do not even have to contact anyone you can just download their tree from their website or the online database they are using. People are still sharing information with me that originated with me and they do not know it.

Now this will not stop me from sharing my information but it will curtail what and how much I share in the future. People need to understand the power the internet has and the effect it can have on your privacy. Maybe the pendulum will start to swing the other way and privacy will be in vogue again.

There also has to be a certain respect for the work and effort of the person who did the research on the family in the first place. There are notes in my family tree that tell me where the information came from originally. It includes a person’s name and contact information.

Two questions keep coming to mind – How can you be sure that the family tree you find online is really yours? How valid is the research that was done on the family tree that you have found?

©2011 – Blair Archival Research