St Patrick’s Day

I’m not sure how our small green island in the north Atlantic ocean swung it, but everyone in the world celebrates our national holiday. What a lovely thing. It’s like a benign form of colonisation. All you have to do is raist a toast to Ireland once a year. What are you doing to celebrate this year? I’m celebrating by briefly leaving Ireland for London, which will involve a talk at the Society of Genealogists. I’ll be talking about my many compatriots who made that trip before me & enhanced a great city.

Spring Cleaning

This time of year naturally lends itself to tidying and cleaning. I’ve been getting rid of old genealogy magazines, which of course meant reading most of them again. Find out how I got on here.

Records released

Since my last newsletter, Irishgenealogy.ie has uploaded their annual extra year of records. This means the site now has births from 1925, marriages from 1950 and deaths from 1975. Remember though that events which happened close to the end of the year may have been registered in 1926 or a subsequent year and may only give you an index. This is the case with my late lovely great-aunt, born in October 1925. On her entry, this message appears.

One interesting facet of the 1975 deaths is the most people by then die in a hospital. This means we no longer get a relative registering a person’s death, as you can see on this page from Killarney, where a variety of staff members have bulk registered everyone who died in Killarney hospital. The good news is that practically everyone in Ireland would have a newspaper death by the mid-1970s, so if you can find that, you’ll likely get significantly more detail on their family and, of course, where they were buried.

Still waiting for early death records though

Of course, I had hoped Irishgenealogy would update the death registers to finally include the earliest years (1864-1870) but there’s still no sign of it. Looks like there might be some kind inter-departmental bun fight going on. I wrote about it during February, but am still considering whether a Freedom of Information request might be useful here. This post also includes some workarounds for accessing those early records.

Irish Tontines

This isn’t a topic I knew much about but wanted to highlight the fantastic research done at the Royal Irish Academy on this subject by Dr Andrew McDiarmid.

International Women’s Day

I can’t leave March without a nod to International Women’s day which we celebrate on the 8th. Although it’s been marked for decades in eastern Europe, it’s really only been in this century that we’ve noted it in Ireland. I’ve written in previous years about my great-grandmothers, my great-great grandmother, Annie Mahony, and my most prolific ancestor, Anne Rourke, the mother of 17 children, but this month, I pay tribute to my own mother, Paula Walters, who died towards the end of last year and is very much missed. I haven’t written an obituary on my blog because I prefer to focus on less recent family. Although, there was a funny comment from a younger member of my family who asked if there would “be any ancestors at Nana’s funeral?” which brightened a very sad day! Here is my mother on St Patrick’s Day in 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. We met in a local park and used the bench as, er, a bench mark to keep 2 metres apart!