PART 1 Tracing back to Ireland: first steps
Unless your family has never left Ireland, the very first step in researching your Irish family history is to trace back to your migrant ancestor. Although there are many reasons why the Irish have spread so widely across the world, the Great Famine of the 1840s accounts for over 2 million people alone – and you may very well find that one of these migrants was your ancestor. For those who already know where their Irish ancestors lived, this section will be useful for tracing down other branches to find relatives living all around the world.
CHAPTER 1 First find your immigrant
The first task in tracing your Irish roots is to trace back to your migrant forebear.
Clues to Irish roots
Most people start with a hunch or a story. The most obvious clue is a surname in your family that sounds Irish. Whilst having an Irish surname yourself may make you feel more Irish than otherwise, it doesn’t actually matter which lines you investigate – whether they come through your father or mother, or any grandparent or great-grandparent, Irish roots are Irish roots.
‘O’ and ‘Mac’ surnames often indicate Irish (or Scottish) ancestry, but in past centuries many such prefixes were dropped. Some, like Murphy and Kelly, are still obviously Irish: others, like Crowley and Denning, may be Irish but don’t sound it, whilst some Irish surnames, like Comiskey and Costello, sound anything but. The chapter on Irish names (p. 146) will help you determine what are likely to be genuine Irish surnames, and which might be red herrings.
Forenames tend to pass down through generations, so distinctively Irish ones might still be in use even in families that no longer realise their original significance. Theresa, Bernadette, Ellen, Timothy, Laurence and indeed my own name, Anthony, for example, are good clues.
Often, stories will survive. Some can arise because of a recent relative’s incorrect research, or just their imaginings, and be thoroughly unreliable. But most are genuinely inherited from people who knew what had happened, and contain at least a grain of truth. The Crowleys in Glasgow, for example, believe their family left Ireland because an ancestor couldn’t pay his rent, and shot the man who came to collect it. I don’t know if the last bit is true, but they were absolutely right about having Irish roots, and that’s what matters. Always record the stories you hear faithfully, for you never know when they may give you a vital clue for your research.
Sometimes, family traditions survive through less obvious routes. In my maternal grandmother’s case, it turned out that the name of her family home in Ruislip, ‘Knockatane’, was that of her father’s native townland in Ireland.
Further clues may be so obscure that you will only recognise them after you have found your Irish roots. Pet names used within families, ways of preparing food, or superstitions handed down through generations may turn out to have originated in Ireland. In fact, most of us never realise how much of ‘us’ has been inherited from earlier generations, until we start tracing our family history.
Ask the family
The first resource for tracing your Irish family is – your family! Telephone, email or meet your immediate relatives and ask for their stories and copies of any old family photographs and papers, especially family bibles, old birth, marriage and death certificates, or memorial cards, which were especially popular amongst Catholics. When I traced my Irish roots, my late grandmother’s old address book led me to relatives in England, Ireland and America, all of whom gave me more information to extend my family tree.
It’s best to structure your questions by asking the person about themselves, then:
their siblings (brothers and sisters)
their parents and their siblings
their grandparents and their siblings
…and so on. Then, ask about any known descendants of the siblings in each generation. The key questions to ask about each relative are:
full name
date and place of birth
date and place of marriage (if applicable)
occupation(s)
place(s) of residence
religious denomination – for Irish ancestry this is of course of key importance
any interesting stories and pictures
Next, ask for addresses of any relatives, contact them and repeat the process (which will result in some repeated information, and some contradictory details: write it all down and check it in original sources later). And don’t neglect the Irish in Ireland. Once you have traced Irish ancestors, it is worth tracing down other branches of the family who remained there, to find cousins who may know much about your earlier ancestors. Sometimes, they’ll even have tales about relatives who emigrated.
The consequences of famine
Whether potatoes reached Ireland with Sir Walter Raleigh, or from Spain (as their early Irish name, an spáinneach, suggests) is open to question. They first appear in a lease in Co. Down of 1606. They were grown initially to break up soil in fields used for cereals. By the late 18th century, most grain was grown for landlords to export, and the potato had become the peasants’ staple crop. Potatoes were boiled and eaten, and mixed where possible with milk or fish.
Peasants tied to the land tended to marry young, thus producing large families. Nourished by potatoes, the population grew from 2 million in 1700 to 2.3 million in 1754, 5 million in 1800 and 8 million in 1841. There were scarcely any industrial towns to soak up this excess population, so peasant landholdings had to be subdivided, making families dependent on increasingly tiny plots.
The potato harvest had failed occasionally, but from 1821, when the crop failed in Munster and many people in Cork and Clare starved, a series of calamities took place. In Irish folklore, the famine-bringing fairy was the Fear-Gorta, the ‘man of hunger’, who stalked the land as an emaciated beggar. He reappeared again with fresh crop failures in 1825–30, followed by ‘stark famine’ in Munster and south Leinster in 1832. Thenceforth, the crop failed periodically.
Despite
