Meeting of Wednesday 29 January 2020
Speaker: Probian Vice-President, Hugh Ward Topic: Genealogy
Over the years Hugh has become quite knowledgeable about researching the information needed to construct a family tree. While most people can name the parents and grandparents typically things become murky when researching great grandparents and their parents. For those whose forebears were born and raised in Ireland the website www.irishgenealogy.ie is an excellent starting point. Its records include all registered births from 1864 – 1919, all marriages from 1864 – 1919 and all deaths from 1864 to 1969. To illustrate he logged on to Irish Genealogy via the Golf Club’s wi-fi network and opened up files containing civil records. However in the midst of his demonstration the system crashed and Hugh was forced to continue with verbal descriptions of how to proceed. Church records, he said, are worth investigating but are often incomplete because of poor book-keeping in the 19th Century. He warned that it was quite usual for the spelling of surnames to vary over time – as with McCullough, McCullagh and McCulla. The Griffith Valuation undertaken after the famine 1864 – 65 records the names of all persons resident in Ireland parish by parish, and district by district and is often a fruitful line of inquiry. Many questions brought this interesting session to a close.