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Collins Tracing your Irish family history
Anthony Adolph
To Ann Lavelle, for Extraordinary Ancestors and everything else that followed as a consequence – and whose surname, incidentally, speaks eloquently of her family roots in Co. Mayo.
Table of Contents
PART 1 Tracing Back to Ireland: First Steps
CHAPTER 1 First Find Your Immigrant
CHAPTER 2 Using and Storing Records
PART 2 Tracing Back to Ireland: Country by Country
CHAPTER 5 United States of America
PART 3 Tracing Your Roots in Ireland
CHAPTER 10 Introducing Ireland
CHAPTER 11 The Divisions of Ireland
CHAPTER 12 Griffith’s Valuation and Tithe Applotments
CHAPTER 15 Religious Registers
CHAPTER 16 Occupational Records
CHAPTER 17 Dictionary of Irish Sources
PART 4 Tracing Ancient Irish Roots
CHAPTER 21 Milesius was Your Ancestor
CHAPTER 22 Ancient Irish Roots
CHAPTER 23 The Invasions of Ireland
Recently, I interviewed an Irish economist who was explaining the phenomenal impact of the Irish in Britain. From Lennon/McCartney to Wayne Rooney and even Tony Blair, the Irish strain has always produced second and third generation performers. In London, some of the major landmark buildings are being snapped up by men who started life making tea on building sites off Regent Street. So, is this reverse-colonisation or just the natural upshot of an emigration-prone nation?
In America, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy helped not only to put the emigrant Irish on the map but also to take them out of the ‘no dogs, no blacks, no Irish’ generation. Ever since, nearly every American president has found some class of connection to this small but beautiful island. As I write, Senator Hillary Clinton continues to parade her Irish roots and Barack Obama has claimed a bloodline to Co. Offaly.
How times have changed in Ireland. There have always been Irish sons and daughters on the move in search of better times, but the great ‘brain drain’ that characterised generation after generation of migrants from the Famine to the dark economic days of the 1980s has now halted, thanks to the welcome appearance of peace in the 1990s. A new prosperity has stopped Irishmen and women leaving and brought many of them home to an emotional reunion with families who had expected empty places at the dinner table forever.
With
