O’Riley. If you have absolutely loads on Aloysius and his descendants, you might want to open a separate ‘chapter’ for him and put him at the top of his own narrative document.
Eustace O’Riley, son of Joseph.
Write what you know about Eustace, and so on.
Civil Registration records
Most countries have a system of civil registration (sometimes called General Registration) of births, marriages and deaths. Some started very recently, but most of the countries that received Irish immigrants have systems that started in the 19th century – often, in fact, coinciding with the Irish Diaspora, making them particularly useful.
Usually, your mining of family knowledge will result in a family tree starting with a name (‘John or maybe James O’Brien’) followed by their child, with a bit more information (say, ‘Thomas O’Brien, born in 1922’), and then a third generation down, with much more definite information (‘Ellen O’Brien, born on 22 February 1951, Lismore, New South Wales’). You may think you’ll save money and time if you start with John (or James!), but then what will you look for? Starting with Thomas would be better, as you can look for a birth in 1922, but as you don’t know where he was born you’ve no idea where to look, and you’re probably not 100 per cent sure that the year 1922 was correct – this might be a year calculated from an age at death, and these seldom take into account when in the year people’s birthdays fell – so Thomas could have been born in 1921 (or 1923!). Therefore, start with what you know for sure, and seek Ellen’s birth certificate. Once you have this, you’ve established a firm foothold, and can work back with confidence.
Generally, birth records tell you when and where the child was born, the names of both parents and the father’s occupation. Some countries’ records will give more, such as when the parents married.
The birth certificate is a contemporary source providing the parents’ names, probably from their own mouths – not half-remembered hearsay, then, but fact. Now, work back through the marriage indexes, seeking their wedding. Marriage certificates usually state names, occupations and places of residence of the couple, their ages and names of parents – either just fathers, or sometimes mothers too. Thus, following our example, you’ll now have a definite age for Thomas, and know his father’s name (James, not John), all recorded at the time, from the people concerned. Sometimes they lied about ages – if you discover discrepancies, you’ll simply have to widen the period of your subsequent 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 –
