Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors

The second edition of Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors is an expert introduction for the family historian to the wealth of material available to researchers in archives throughout Northern Ireland. Many records, like the early twentieth-century census returns and school registers, will be familiar to researchers, but others are often overlooked by all but the most experienced of genealogists. An easy-to-use, informative guide to the comprehensive collections available at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is a key feature of Ian Maxwells handbook. He also takes the reader through the records held in many libraries, museums and heritage centres across the province, and he provides detailed coverage of records that are available online. Unlike the rest of the British Isles, which has very extensive civil and census records, Irish ancestral research is hampered by the destruction of many of the major collections. Yet Ian Maxwell shows how family historians can make good use of church records, school registers and land and valuation records to trace their roots to the beginning of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Finding Your Irish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide is the ultimate resource to help you learn if the luck of the Irish is in your blood or not. This easy-to-use guide will teach you to make use of the many Irish family history records that have become available in recent years. Explore the best family history sources in Ireland, including birth, marriage, and death records; church records; census records; and much more. Finding Your Irish Ancestors will help you discover Internet sites for searching Irish heritge and prepare for a successful family history trip to Ireland.

"This volume provides an authoritative survey of the material held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland ... [It] provides invaluable information on how to explore Northern Ireland's public and private records, and the material held about its churches, schools, law courts, businesses and individuals. It also explains step by step how to research records of births, marriages, and deaths, as well as directing the reader to other less well-known sources containing valuable genealogical information."--Back cover.

“A thorough and informative guide . . . with as many references to websites for Northern Irish genealogy as for the Republic of Ireland.” —Who Do You Think You Are Magazine Ireland has experienced considerably more tragedy when it comes to the preservation of resources for family historians than its close neighbor Britain. Many of the nation’s primary records were lost during the civil war in 1922 and through other equally tragic means. But in this new book Chris Paton, the Northern-Irish-born author of the bestselling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet, shows that not only has a great deal of information survived, it is also increasingly being made available online. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland, organizations such as FindmyPast Ireland, Ancestry.co.uk and RootsIreland, and the massive volunteer genealogical community, more and more of Ireland’s historical resources are accessible from afar. As well as exploring the various categories of records that the family historian can turn to, Chris Paton illustrates their use with fascinating case studies. He fully explores the online records available from both the north and the south from the earliest times to the present day. Many overseas collections are also included, and he looks at social networking in an Irish context where many exciting projects are currently underway. His book is an essential introduction and source of reference for anyone who is keen to trace their Irish roots. “Chris Paton has produced this much-needed book for researchers tracing Irish roots, pulling together all the current online resources and expert advice into one handy guide.” —Family Tree Magazine

John Grenham's Tracing Your Irish Ancestors is arguably the best book ever written on Irish genealogy. Not since Margaret Falley's Irish and Scotch-Irish Ancestral Research, written in the early 1960s, has there been a book that combines all the best features of a textbook and a reference book, expertly describing the various steps in the research process while at the same time providing an indispensable body of source materials for immediate use. Now, updated to reflect the enormous changes brought about by the Internet, the new Third Edition of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors marks another huge step forward in Irish genealogy. Most importantly, a chapter has been added that deals specifically with the Internet, while a new online subsection showing county Internet sources has been added to each of the county source lists and, where possible, references have been given throughout for any online versions of the records dealt with. Book jacket.