10 Tips for Tracing Your Irish Heritage

Published Monday, September 20th 2021
Categories
Ireland Ancestry Travel

Are you tracing your Irish heritage? Traveling to your ancestor's village to immerse yourself in the culture is amazing. If you have a family tree compiled with regions, a hometown ancestry tour allows you to experience a customized vacation built around where your ancestors lived and worked.


Researching your family ancestry helps you make the most of your vacation to Ireland. Here are some tips to help you.

 

Genealogists will often hit dead ends because of missing or incomplete records. Two pivotal events decreased the availability of historical records from Ireland. Nevertheless, many other resources for ancestry research remain both in the U.S. and Ireland.

 

TRACING YOUR IRISH ANCESTORS


Talk to Your Family

Most families have at least one individual who keeps track of the extended network of relatives. It makes no sense to spend days crawling through records to find your great-grandmother’s surname if someone in the family already knows it.

 

Common Irish Surnames

When searching for common surnames, use an Irish locality to differentiate people with the same last name. Moving around is a modern-day thing, and most families stayed in the same geographic location for hundreds of years. Pinpointing a particular geographic region will help you narrow your search.


Name Variants

Be aware of name variations. It’s very possible your surname changed and was spelled differently over the ages. Check for alternate spellings in an Irish surname dictionary. Try behindthename.com or the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland available at libraries or bookstores.

 

Vital Records

Knowing where a family member emigrated will make finding vital records such as birth, marriage, and death certificates from local sources easier. Neighborhood churches, municipal governments, and the Census may provide documents and clues.

 

CHECK PASSENGER MANIFESTS

Use passenger lists to locate your ancestor’s town or city of origin. Many online resources are available to search by name and date of passage. A few examples are:

  • Ancestry.com provides access to Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans Ship Passenger Lists.
  • The National Archives allows access to information regarding over 600,000 Irish Famine Immigrants who arrived in New York. archives.gov

 

ASK THE NEIGHBORS

If your family’s region of origin continues to elude you, you can use their new world neighbors to help you narrow down the search. People from the same village or town often relocated together to a new country. Use census information or vital records to identify where a few neighbors lived after arriving in the U.S. 

 

SEARCH OLD NEWSPAPER LISTINGS

The Boston College Libraries provides several genealogy guides and a database of ads for Irish Immigrants published in the Boston Pilot Newspaper from October 1831 to October 1921. This database contains over 41,000 advertisements from friends and relatives looking for a “lost” loved one. The ads often contain extensive information about the missing person’s life, including a physical description, parish of birth, when they left Ireland, when they arrived in the U.S., and their occupation. libguides.bc.edu/irishgenealogy

 

USE ONLINE IRISH SOURCES 

Search online sources in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland to help you uncover your Irish heritage. They provide historical records of births, marriages, and death records.

 

COLLABORATE WITH GENEALOGY ENTHUSIASTS

Join a genealogy or historical society for advice and resources. So much of the information you need is out there, already researched, and possibly shared by a long-lost relative. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

 

HIRE SOMEONE TO RESEARCH YOUR ANCESTRY

Several genealogy centers, with a level of access not found in free resources, will do the work for you.

  • Irish Family History Foundation - rootsireland.ie
  • Eneclann is an award-winning history and heritage company that offers Irish genealogy and history research services - eneclann.ie

 
Traveling to discover your Irish heritage is worth the effort and I’m happy to help.

 

SCHEDULE YOUR ANCESTRY TRAVEL PLANNING SESSION