Here comes the summer

Welcome to my June newsletter. We’ve finally got some decent weather here in Ireland, so we need to use those single digit days to best purpose: genealogy.

I’m delighted to announce two DNA workshops at Fingal Local Studies & Archives in June and July. Spaces will be limited so that I can give personal attention to each participant, who will need to have already taken a DNA test and bring a device and/or be able to access their results on the day. All the details for booking are below.

There was big news in the world of genetic genealogy this week with MyHeritage suddenly ending the transfer of kits. For many years, MyHeritage accepted a transfer of raw DNA from another testing company. You could upload for free, pay a small unlock fee to access all the tools and have another database for your matches. In more recent times, a subscription to MyHeritage was also required to make the best use of it. Many people have uploaded and it’s helped grow their database to an impressive 9.3m. It’s been a go to point for me in work on unknown parentage cases and I’ve found crucial matches in there every time. However, the industry has been aware for some years that forensic genetic genealogists (who work to solve crimes) use this database, despite it being expressly against the MH terms of service. While I’m not sure precisely what precipitated this on a Thursday/Friday overnight without any announcement, it seems to be appearing slowly across the world. I haven’t been able to upload for about a week now but some countries are still reporting that they can. MyHeritage has made no official announcement at all. The lovely Leah Larkin has a bigger piece about it here.

I was over in the Representative Church Body Library last week in Churchtown & I asked for an update on the digitisation of the Church of Ireland records they hold. Claire Santry last reported a couple of years ago that the project was heavily delayed by Covid. Here’s what I found out. They now have almost all parishes scanned but not transcribed. They have them on two computers in the reading room, which may make for faster checking. I asked about making them available online and it seems there isn't a plan for now. They intend to use Transkribus to transcribe the records but there is no timeframe for release at the moment.

Lovely Irish comedian, Aisling Bea, was on Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC two weeks ago. In a depature for the show, the whole episode was based in Ireland. Not surprising for someone who is Irish! Her ancestry featured the beautiful but no longer inhabited Blasket Islands and had some excellent maternal line stories. It was also very nice to see the pedigrees properly formatted with women’s birth names and some Irish used. WDYTYA often fails on this basic principle. If you have access to the BBC Iplayer or some other way to view, it is available now.

Lastly for this month, some more good news. Mount Jerome in Dublin is one of the city’s largest cemeteries. In the past, it was often favoured by Protestant denominations and was the first privately owned cemetery when it opened in 1836 on land that had previously belonged to the Earl of Meath. It has more than 220,000 burials. Over the years, I’ve made use of the partial transcriptions available at Ireland Genealogy Projects and often emailed the graveyard to ask for more details, when I spotted a newspaper notice of a burial there. The website lists some famous men (though no famous women) who were buried there including Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar, and Sir Richard Griffith (he of Griffith’s Valuation fame!) They have people who were not knighted as well. Mount Jerome has now finally built a free public database for searches, although it’s hard to find the link from their main website to it. Here’s a test search I did for my ancestor George Walters, who I already knew was buried there.

You can limit it to a range of years, or just use a surname for search. Each name is then hyper-linked to its own page, although the map search doesn’t work (still seems to be in beta). Clicking on all interments, you get a full list of who is in the grave, which hopefully might yield some additional family members. In this case, it didn’t for me.

However, I’m delighted to report I’ve killed off several family members by finding their graves in Mount Jerome, including the George Walters who died in 1916 in the above list, who was the son of the other George. Happy days!