Collins Tracing Your Irish Family History

How to use this book

This book is designed to help you trace your Irish roots back as far as they can go.

 If you are living outside Ireland, the first task is to trace back to your Irish immigrant ancestor. Most people alive now with Irish roots live outside Ireland – mainly due to the mass migration of the 19th century, and in particular the Great Famine of the 1840s.

 If you are using this book in Ireland, or already know your Irish place of origin, after reading part 1 of the book you may want to turn directly to part 3 (p. 72), where you’ll find resources for tracing ancestry within Ireland.

 This book will be useful, too, for anyone wanting to trace relatives, because all Irish families, without exception, have cousins all over the world, from Britain to Argentina and Canada to New Zealand, often within only a handful of generations.

For many people, the most difficult step is finding where in Ireland your ancestors came from. If records in the country of migration don’t tell you, there are various techniques you can employ to ascertain the most likely areas – mainly by localising the surname and, now, seeking DNA matches. In most cases you will succeed. Then, you can explore your family using Irish records, seeking cousins, learning about your family’s social history, and tracing back as far as records allow. You may get back many centuries but, sadly, due to lack of records, many lines don’t go back much further than the early 19th century.

If so, you’ll still have the immense pleasure of being able to visit an obscure corner of Ireland, and say (or just think, if you’re more modest) ‘my people came from here!’. But having done so, please don’t let the limitations of the sources blind you into thinking you’ve reached the end of the trail. For within Ireland, families have tended to remain fairly stationary for long periods of time. Where any earlier records for your ancestral area survive, you may pick up members of earlier generations – serving in local militias, employed as officials on landed estates, or in an Elizabethan pardon for taking part in a local rising.

The same applies to going back yet further. Because Ireland was not invaded by Rome, yet was converted to Christianity early on, it has one of the richest storehouses of traditional genealogy in the world. Most surnames fit into old family trees showing when and how they originated. Early pedigrees in many cases trace back to the younger sons of the Irish kings, to within a few centuries of the start of the Christian era. Before then, pedigrees based perhaps more in myth than reality stretch right back into the mists of time, to the heroic days when the Sons of Mil, the Milesian ancestors of the modern Irish, wrested green Erin (old Ireland) from the ancient gods, the Tuatha de Danann. Such old pedigrees tell of legendary ancestors, and we simply don’t know how many grains of truth they may contain.

When I was writing this book, the Chief Herald of Ireland himself was kind enough to talk to me about our Milesian forebears. ‘Ultimately’, he said, ‘the myth is what sustains you. It doesn’t matter if it is true: for what is unquestionably true is the belief our ancestors had in the myth.’ Neither he nor I would ever advocate imagining that ancient Irish ancestors were definite historical characters. But to research your Irish ancestry and not thoroughly enjoy finding personal connections, albeit just through your surname, to the grand, heroic traditions of this beautiful island, would be as daft as flying all the way from New York to Dublin, and then not leaving your hotel room.

There’s never been a better time to research your Irish ancestors, either. With the great advances in the way records are catalogued, indexed, archived and even made available on the Internet, it’s vastly cheaper and easier to trace your Irish roots than ever before. But these positive developments are nothing compared to what comes next. At each stage of your journey, from finding your Irish kin, and your ancestral home, and testing out the ancient cousinships suggested by Medieval and even legendary pedigrees, the spanking-new science of genetics has completely revolutionised this revered old subject of ours. Having your DNA examined is incredibly easy and now relatively cheap. The more people who add their test results to databases, the more extraordinary the emerging results become. Some long-established genealogical ‘truths’ have already been crushed. And, amazingly, some ancient family trees, that most serious scholars thought couldn’t possibly be true, have been tested by this cutting-edge scientific approach – and been found to be correct after all.

If you’re already well advanced on your journey, I hope this book will assist you to make wonderful new discoveries. If you’ve just started – behold the world of possibilities that awaits you!

Abbreviations

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 their terrible living conditions, relatively few Catholics had left Ireland. Besides legal restrictions on their movement, not lifted until 1827, both poverty and an emotional tie to their ancestral land kept most in Ireland. Between 1827 and 1837, 400,000 souls had clambered aboard ships leaving Belfast, Dublin, Sligo, Waterford and Youghal. Those who could afford it headed for America: the less costly option was Canada, whence many planned to walk south. The cheapest option was the ferry fare to mainland Britain. Most Irish Catholics, however, were still in Ireland when disaster struck.

In 1845, an American disease, phytophthora infestans, ‘potato blight’, swept Ireland. Exacerbated by three weeks’ heavy rain at harvest time, it destroyed 30–40 per cent of the crop. The Fear-Gorta stalked the land again, and people were forced to eat the parts of the crop they would otherwise have sold to pay their rent. Connacht, west Munster and rural Ulster were the worst affected, but nowhere was unaffected, and starvation even spread to the towns. If the blight had lessened in 1846, conditions might have eased, but instead it struck even harder, reducing 95 per cent of the year’s crop to rotten slime. The cruellest irony is that people knew that every surviving potato they ate meant one less to plant next year: although the blight eased in 1847, the potato yield was a mere 10 per cent of what it had been in 1844.

The Internet

Computers are readily available in libraries or internet cafés (or friends’ houses!). If you don’t use the Internet already, I would strongly recommend learning from a friend or joining a class, as it will make tracing your Irish roots vastly easier. If you absolutely can’t bear the idea, ask an Internet-savvy friend or relative to do your look-ups for you.

The Internet is a vast, random whirlpool of information. Besides the research sites recommended later on, there are several excellent ones that put like-minded genealogists in touch with each other, such as the British www.genesreunited.com, American www.onegreatfamily.com and www.ancestry.com/uk which is American and British – though there’s much overlap, especially for Ireland. You enter names, dates and places for your family and the sites tell you if anyone else has entered the same ancestors. Equally, when new ancestors join and enter the same relatives, they’ll easily find you. It’s a new method, that really works.

The online route to Wogan’s roots

One Irish trait you’ll encounter often is a love of storytelling. To trace the family tree of Irish broadcaster and disc-jockey Terry Wogan for Family History Monthly I keyed ‘Wogan’ and ‘genealogy’ into an Internet search engine – www.google.com and www.altavista.com are two good ones. I quickly came up with The Wogan Genealogy Site, www.wogan.info, whose webmaster, Ken Wogan, put me in touch with Joanne Hartung, whose sister Nancy Dreicer had traced a link with Terry. Two days after starting, I had an email from Nancy, telling me about her grandfather Thomas Joseph Wogan, who was Terry’s great-uncle. Thomas had migrated from Enniskerry, Co. Wexford, to New York’s Ellis Island on the Lusitania in 1908. ‘He was a charmer’, Nancy wrote, ‘with a Shakespeare quote for any occasion.’ Thomas became the sommelier at the Statler Hilton Hotel, Philadelphia, until one day he vanished. An astonishing two weeks later, Thomas was finally found – in the furthest reaches of the hotel’s wine cellar! It transpired that he had gone down a fortnight earlier for a tipple, but had so many that he’d lost track of time. He left the hotel with no job and, one assumes, a very sore head. That’s typical of the family stories you’ll hear when you ask around – and maybe it betrays my own Irish genes that I’ve retold you the same tale now.

Workhouses

Ireland’s 163 Poor Law Unions, each with its own workhouse, were established to distribute relief to the poor in 1838, uncannily anticipating the Great Famine. Before then, relief had been ‘outdoor’, handed out to people in their own homes, but from 1838, if you wanted help, you had to submit to the appalling conditions of the workhouses.

Workhouses were supposed to be unpleasant enough to discourage all but the genuinely needy. Life for most, however, was so bad that, as one of the Poor Law Commissioners wrote, ‘it must be obvious to anyone conversant with the habits and mode of living of the Irish people that to establish a dietary [system] in the workhouse inferior to the ordinary diet of the poor classes would be difficult, if not, in many cases, impossible.’ Instead, the authorities enforced draconian working regimes lasting 7 am to 8 pm, with card-playing and alcohol banned and most misdemeanours punishable by flogging.