Black Friday

Black Friday was never a thing in Europe until a few years ago. Given its connection to US Thanksgiving, it has no cultural resonance across the Atlantic. However, it seems to be here to stay and with it comes some fantastic genealogy offers. Here are some of the particularly good deals available if you are so inclined. There’s no affiliate links: just stuff I picked out to highlight.

MyHeritage is selling their autosomal DNA test for €29. Buy it now and hold off sending it back until they confirm the planned whole genome testing is being applied to all new kits.

Ancestry is selling their autosomal DNA test at UK ST £39 plus shipping until 20th November. This is the cheapest time of the year to get into the biggest database.

FamilyTree DNA has an array of upgrades, add-ons and bundles for their autosomal, Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests. If you’ve never tested with them before and are a biological male, you could take all 3 tests for USD $507. That’s a fantastic price. I’ve bought an add-on mitochondrial DNA test for one of my kits, which cost USD $129.

Remember though, it’s only a bargain if you would have bought it anyway! DNA tests don’t go out of date, so you could preemptively buy one.

Irish News Archive

Readers of my newsletter and blog will know how valuable newspapers can be to your family history research. A few years ago I found a letter written by my 3x great-grandfather to a newspaper in 1858.

The Irish Newspaper Archive is launching a new version of their site this week. I’ve had a sneaky peak by way of some beta testing and it looks great! Remember to be gentle when you look at the new site. It’ll take a while to learn the new navigation routes. I especially like the layout which shows me many pages of a newspaper all at once, which makes it easy to spot the deaths column. This was often moved around in a newspaper to fit other articles. You can see some demos they recorded in the video below. They usually have a great Black Friday offer too but I haven’t seen it yet this year.

Latin for Genealogists

If you have Catholic ancestors, it’s likely that you will at some stage need to read some Latin in your research. The International Institute of Genealogical Studies has a new book out specifically to guide family historians and genealogists. I had a small involvement in putting this book together, so naturally I think it’s great, but it’s modestly priced and available as an ebook if you want to avoid shipping and customs charges.

CIÉ Archives

Córas Iompair Éireann is Ireland’s national transport company: they manage trains and buses through various subsidiaries. They have just begun putting their archives online and it will hopefully be of interest to those whose ancestors worked on railways, canals or trams. Press coverage says there is over 166,000 pages of material dating back to the 19th century. It covers railway, tram and canal workers, as well as corporate records. I’ve only begun playing around with this database but it looks very promising. Of particular interest will be the name database, which holds 7000 names at present, with more to come. Here’s a sample result. The link brings you to a viewer where you can browse the books. I did a search for a client case (which for confidentiality I have not shown below) and it has identified a person in that family and it links to his census returns, so clearly a lot of thought has been put into this database.

Date set for Ireland’s next census

Historically, Ireland has done a census every 5 years since 1946, on the first and sixth year in a decade. The census was skipped in 1976 as a money saving exercise, only for the government to run a mini-census in 1979 after they sheepishly admitted they needed the census for long-term planning! It’s always been in April. In the 21st century, we’ve twice postponed the census in 2001, due to a foot and mouth epidemic, and more recently in 2021 because of COVID. We took the census in 2002 and then went back to the schedule of 2006, 2011, 2016, 2022, but now, throwing the whole thing off kilter, we’re going to 9th May 2027! Why move from April? Madness, I tell you. However, this will be the first census with an option to complete online. It will also incluse the blank “time capsule” space again. The letter I linked to above from my ancestor includes my 2022 letter to the Irish Times with suggestions of what to include in the space. I’m already planning what to put in the next one!

Finally for this newsletter, here’s a selection of my recent book purchases. I’ll be reviewing them in due course but thought I’d show you them now in case you’re in the mood for a bit of retail therapy.