Happy New Year

It’s 2026 at last and we are on the home stretch in counting down the days to the 1926 census release. As I write this newsletter, we are 93 days and 8 hours away from the launch. Can you tell I’m excited?

The Director of the National Archives, Orlaith McBride, did a piece on David McCullough’s RTÉ Radio One yesterday, which you can listen to below.

At the end of last year, I published a piece on my 2026 Irish genealogy wishlist. I’ve already got one thing on it - Ancestry clusters appeared earlier this week on my account at last, so I’m getting to grips with them and will review in due course. What’s on your wishlist? One thing not on the list, which I promised myself, was to try and get more reading done. Normally I’m a great reader but the non-fiction often piles up when I find I’m too tired for it at the end of the day. Well, I’ve started well with 6 books already under my belt for the month. One of them, Tracing your Farming Ancestors in Ireland by William J. Roulston will be of interest to my readers, so I’ve written up a review. Spoiler: it’s very good!

There are still a couple of places for my DNA workshop at Fingal Local Studies & Archives next week, so if you’re local to the area and would like to attend, here’s the booking details.

My copy of Family Tree magazine arrived in the post today and I see Chris Paton has an article about reviewing your own research. This is quite a coincidence because I had just written a piece on the same topic myself. Reviewing your own work is really good practice as you often spot gaps in the research or things you’d just plain missed. You can read my mea culpa here.

Lastly, I want to mention a very cool genealogy cruise that’s happening next November. If you feel like combining a Caribbean holiday with learning about genetic genealogy from the best in the biz, Dr Blaine Bettinger & Angie Bush, then this is the place to be.