February at last but where's the sun?

Virtual Sunshine

I'm a big fan of RTÉ's Doc on One series and the latest episode has an interesting family history element as an Irish family goes to Jamaica to look into their ancestor's slave-owning activities there. Ireland, as part of the British Empire, has not yet really begun to properly address our own role in slavery and historical wrongdoing, so it's good to see this kind of documentary being broadcast.

Also on RTÉ recently, which I just happened to hear while cooking dinner, was a short segment on Drivetime with John Grenham, who was talking about how it's never been easier to research your family tree. He's right, but I don't agree that it's not worth hiring a genealogist to help you. There's lots of reasons why you might want to hire one (me!) such as:

• Not being confident using internet resources - if your Irish ancestry is not recent, then it's easy to make mistakes or be misled by someone else's poorly researched online tree

• You're interested but would rather enjoy the fruits of someone else's labour

• You're time poor

• You were adopted, born in a Mother & Baby home or were a foundling and need to rely on DNA to make progress - it has a much steeper learning curve than finding a family on the 1911 census

Census news

The countdown to the release of the 1926 Census continues. The National Archives media campaign is ramping up. They currently have an ad running advising centenarians that their personal data (i.e. the details of where and who they lived with on 18th April 1926) will be published online, but they can contact the NAI if they have concerns. You can hear the ad at 50:25 in this broadcast. If you are lucky enough to have someone in this category in your family and they lived in Ireland then, be sure to let them know.

Upcoming Talks & Workshops

I've got some talks and workshops coming up both in-person in Dublin and London (exciting!) and online. Read about them here.

Book review

I recently read a new book about the Guinness family written by the current Earl of Iveagh (although he's not using the title here). Guinness A family succcession: the true story of the battle to control the world’s largest brewery

I've written before about the fantastic Guinness archive of employees (hosted on Ancestry) & my family link as recipients of an Iveagh Trust flat. This book covers the first four generations of the Guinness family, which encompasses the generation who are the focus of the recent Netflix show House of Guinness. It’s fair to say it’s significantly more historically accurate than the TV show! There's a lot about the brewery's early days, the first Arthur Guinness’s social mobility and their huge wealth. Because it's written by their descendant, he's kinder on them than an impartial historian might be, but it's still an enjoyable easy read with some nice pictures. I picked up a signed copy to add to my collection.

More clusters

Hot on the heels of Ancestry finally bestowing their cluster tool, 23andMe have also released a beta version of their own clusters. It’s only available on the Premium service which has a monthly subscription fee. This service isn’t available in Ireland (or I suspect, more accurately, the EU) and I read some suggestions this is down to data privacy being more robustly protected by European laws. However, I don’t see why they can’t separate the spurious health stuff from the genealogy content and offer that separately. I wrote to them to complain and got a nonsense reply as below. If you’ve got the clusters, I’d be most interested to hear your thoughts.

I was back in my alma mater, Trinity College Dublin last week to do some research for an upcoming talk. Trinity has a legal deposit library which means they get a copy of every book publish in both Ireland and the UK. Alumni can apply for a reader’s ticket, but you have to go in there to do the research - no online access to journals (which would be super helpful to independent researchers like me). One nice perk of being a graduate here is the free access to the Book of Kells - you can even bring 2 friends for free. If you find that you have an ancestor who went to Trinity, then you can check out the admissions details for ancestors from 1593-1860 in Alumni dublinenses, which is searchable at Ulster Historical Foundation. Familysearch and Findmypast have an earlier edition that goes up to 1846. You can find more recent alumni in the register in the National Library or by contacting Trinity directly.

That’s your lot for this month!