Introduction

Introduction

The following explains a few things about this website and Irish genealogy. The tedium increases as you go down the page, but most of you will only need to read the first two or three sections.



Purpose and Scope

There are a number of websites that people use to create and share their family trees, like Ancestry. To see someone else's tree on those sites you would usually need a subscription. That is how those sites make money, which is fair enough. But to access all of your families' trees, you'd have to subscribe to all the sites that your family members are using, which is a barrier to sharing information.

The purpose of this site is to share my version of the family tree, no registration or subscription needed. You can download a copy of the tree (see below) which can imported into most genealogy websites and apps. Or you can copy information into your tree or send me submissions and corrections.

This tree includes only blood relatives of Thomas Conway & Bridie Clohessy, and partners of their blood relatives. Information about the family of a partner of a blood relative may be included as a note on that partner.

Living people, and the recently deceased, are excluded from this site for the sake of their privacy and security. There are likely to be several people who are excluded because I don't know if they're still alive or not.

The Personal Page

This is the web page you'll see when you're looking at the details of a specific person.

There is a Personal page for each person on the tree. The Personal page shows events from the life of the person in question, such as births, marriages, deaths, residences etc, and in some cases stories about that person. See Figure 1.

For people for whom I do not have a date of birth I have estimated their year of birth based on the year they were married or the year of the birth of their first child. For people for whom I do not have a date of death I have estimated their year of death based on the assumption that they did not live past 120 years. Those estimated dates are prefixed with the words "estimated before..."

The Personal page also lists a person's
  • Parents
  • Sibings
  • Spouse
  • Children

You can click on the names on those lists to go to the named person's page.

There is no big visual family tree on this site showing how everybody is connected, but each Personal page has a diagram of that person's direct ancestors (parents, grandparents, etc) showing up to five generations. See Figure 2 . You can click on the names on that tree to go to each person's page.

Sources
We add events to our ancestors on a family tree, such as birth, marriage, death, burial information, etc. These events come from a sources such as
  • birth, marriage, death certificates
  • military records
  • census records
  • family bibles
  • personal journals, etc.

The events create a time line of information about that person such as
  • where born
  • occupation
  • where married
  • where they resided
  • any military involvement etc.

Sources confirm WHERE the specific facts come from. In this tree each event has one or more source references (see Figure 1). Click on the link in the Sources column to see details of the source information for the associated event. In the example above clicking on 2a in the Sources column will take you to a source reference showing details of the baptism record, including a transcript and a link to an online image of the record.

Each person also has one or more main source references, shown as links beside the person's name on their page (see Figure 1). Those references show how that person is connected to the family tree. For example a marriage record shows how a person has married into the family, or a birth record shows that a person is a child of people known to be in the family.

All source references relating to a person are listed at the end of their Personal page. You can find where the information for an event (or person) originated by checking the sources. This can be helpful if information in this tree conflicts with your own.

Most source references include a link to a webpage. Some of those webpages can only be accessed if you are registered to the website and logged in. Others require that you also have paid a subscription to the website, in which case the link is prefixed with "$ubscription only".


Sometimes information passes to me without sources. In those cases I have listed the person from whom I received the information as the source. That's right folks, if you don't have a source for your information then you get the blame credit!

The Sources page has an index of all the sources on this site, e.g. censuses, birth/marriage/death records and other records and publications. To see more information on a source click on it's title in the Name column.

Idiosyncrasies of Irish Genealogy

Age
People in Ireland didn't have a reason to know how old they were before the start of the Old Age Pension in 1909. They would often under report their age. Usually the recorded ages of children were correct. In my experience from reading the records, people would start under-reporting their age in early adulthood. The inaccuracy of reported age tended to increase as they grew older. Discrepancies also occurred when one person reported another's age. In the case of a record of death the informant might give an estimate of the deceased's age. This results in a disproportionate number of older people dying at ages of 70, 75, 80 etc..

The Old Age Pension and the 1911 Census
The Old Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced a pension for 'eligible' people aged 70 and over. It came into law in January 1909 across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This gave people a reason to know what age they were, and a reason to pretend that they older than they were. There are many cases where people who under-exaggerated their age for the 1901 Census then over-exaggerated their age in 1911. In one case a man who claimed to be 30 in 1901 aged 25 years by 1911. Fortunately for him, his wife only aged 10 years in the same length of time! On the 1911 census form he wrote "50" to start with, then crossed out the "0" and wrote in another "5", just to be sure.

Baptism and Birth Dates
There were fines for late registration of births (and deaths). To avoid the fine sometimes the family registered the event as having happened at a later date. This means that sometimes parents baptised their child before it was officially born. In such cases I have estimated that the birth happened sometime in the week before the baptism.

Name Variations
When you're searching for genealogical records it's important to know that a person's name can be presented differently in different records. Though literacy rates in Ireland improved dramatically during the second half of the 19th century, many people were illiterate. Priests and other record keepers would have been expected to know (or decide) how to spell names. This is one reason why a peron's name might have speelling variations across records.

Records almost always use the formal version of a person's first name. Many 19th century parish records are in Latin, using the "Latin-ised" form of Christian names (surnames are always in English). In Latin the name changes to indicate son/daughter of, bride of, etc. For example "John son of John" becomes "Johannes, filius Johannis". Click here for a list of names tranlsted from Latin to English. In some cases there are many ways one name can be formalised. For example, a woman called Johanna, calling herself Hannie maybe reported in different records as Johanna, Hannie, Hanoria, Hanora. Some names do not have obvious Latin equivalents. For example Jane might be recorded as Johanna or Janita.

If a child died it a later child in the same family would sometimes be given the same name. So it's not unusual to see two birth or baptism records for what appears to be the same child in different years.

Most parish records only list the names of the people involved, though some include a paragraph formally declaring the ceremony in Latin. For consitency the "transcriptions" of parish records in this tree list only the relevant information from the record, with Latin names translated into English.

Wildcards can help with name variation on some sites like Ancestry. If you put "McC*l*gh" in the last name field on the search page it'll match "McCallagh", "McCullough", "McCollagh" etc. The wildcard "*" matches any number of letters. This works on Ancestry, FindMyPast and irishgenealogy.ie.

Genealogical Beasts and Where to Find Them

Every time you find a new person to add to your tree you'll want to find their birth (or baptism), marriage, death and census records. Birth, marriage and census records in particular are good for finding connections to "new" relatives, e.g. a birth record will have the names of both parents.

If you know when and where a relative was born, you can use their birth record to find their parents. Knowing the names of both parents will help you to find a marriage record. A civil marriage record will give you the residence, occupation and fathers' names of both parties. The date of marriage helps to establish when to start looking for birth records for that couple's children. Catholic weddings usually take place in the parish church of the bride’s family, which is usually the parish in which the bride was born. This is a good first guess to where to look for the bride's birth or baptism records.

Parish Records
Images of the Catholic parish records of baptisms and marriages can be browsed at the NLI's Catholic Parish Registers. The Source page for the collection shows how to use Ancestry or FindMyPast to search the registers. There are burial registers for some parishes, but not for most. The start dates for the registers vary from parish to parish and the NLI has parish register records up to 1880, with gaps. Commerical sites, such as Roots Ireland have parish records later than 1880. To see what records are available for the parish you're interest in, and where to find them, see John Grenham's Catholic parishes in Ireland.

Civil Records
Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began for Catholics in 1864. Those records can searched on the Irish Genealogy site. The civil records are organised by registration district. An index of the civil registration districts by country and by district can be found on the Source pages for Civil Births, Marriages, Deaths. This guide can be used to see which districts are in a particular county, or given a district name, the county (or counties) to which it belongs.

Censuses
The census records can be an excellent resource for expanding your tree. You may be able to find an ancestor and their siblings, parents or their spouse, if you know the name, location and approximate age of a person in your family who was alive in during one of the surviving censuses.

The censuses for 1901 and 1911 in Ireland are available online and can be searched here. Previous censuses were destroyed though some fragments and records relating to those censuses also exist. There was a census taken in 1926, which under current legislation cannot be made public before 2026.

Useful Resources

Irish Genealogy Toolkit - Irish genealogy information, tools and advice

Irish Ancestors - Detailed descriptions of every type of Irish genealogical record, what records are available and where, maps of civil and R.C. parishes (with details of the records available for each parish), placename lookup, surname lookup and much more.

Irish Genealogy News - The latest Irish genealogy news


Sharing a Family Tree

You can share your family tree by exporting (or downloading) a GEDCOM file from your genealogy website or software. GEDCOM is a text file that contains the information from your tree. Most genealogy websites/apps/software will allow you to export or import a GEDCOM file. You can download a GEDCOM file of the tree on this site from the Download page.

Note that some of the information in this tree has been provided by people who have not given sources for every piece of information. In those cases I have given their name as the source. This may make it difficult to verify some of the facts in this tree, which is something you should do before incorporating new information into your own tree.

Here are instructions for downloading a GEDCOM file from (or uploading to) some of the more popular genealogy websites:

findmypast.ie: Download Upload
Ancestry.co.uk: Download Upload
MyHeritage.com: Download Upload
Family Tree Builder: Export Import


N.B. Your GEDCOM file may contain sensitive information, e.g. details of living people. Your genealogy website would only share that information with people you trust. Be careful who you share that GEDCOM file with.

GEDCOM Limitations
The GEDCOM specification flexibility allows it to support many ways of encoding data. This flexibility means that some genealogy programs do not import all the data from a GEDCOM file. All the names and the dates should remain intact, but some the other information may get lost, like the sources or other notes.

Alternatives to GEDCOM
On request I can provide the tree in any of the following formats:

  • Comma Separated Values Spreadsheet (CSV)
  • GEDCOM Extensions (GED2)
  • GeneWeb
  • JSON Export
  • Web Family Tree

Public Discussion of this Website and Tree

I have started a thread on Ancestry's Message Boards so that anyone who wants to can discuss this website / family tree in an open forum. That will allow people to say what they want to say without limiting the discussion to me and them. Also it will provide a public record of the discussion. It doesn't matter which website we use and there's nothing stopping people from using other websites for this purpose. I chose Ancestry because it's popular and is likely to remain operational for a while.

Gramps

Gramps is a genealogical program I use to organise my version of the family tree on my home computer. It is also the program that created this website from that family tree data. If you are using Gramps yourself you can download a copy of the tree in Gramps XML format from the Download page and import the file into Gramps.

While I welcome suggestions for improvements to the website, please be aware that what the website does, and how the website works is determined by Gramps . I can only change the content of the site.

Errors and Omissions

For your amusement there are several errors to be found on this website. The categories of error include, but are not limited to:

Typographical and Logical
Environmental, Instrumental and Statistical (Type I and Type II)
Net Errors, Gross Errors, Cute Errors
Errors of Omission and Errors of Commission
Relative Errors and Errors of Relatives
There are no prizes for finding errors, but if you do find something that I should fix then please send an email to and I'll fix it (or I'll start a heated e-mail exchange in which I will convince you that I was right in the first place). Note though that it is often not enough just to say that something is wrong, e.g. saying that "John Smith wasn't born on that date" isn't particularly helpful. You should normally also say why you think something's wrong and if possible what the correction should be.