Tuesday 7 February 2012

A round up of news from round and about

Olympic exhibition under starter's orders: Louth County Museum in Dundalk is researching a major exhibition highlighting the involvement of Irish athletes and officials in the Olympics from 1896 to the present. The exhibition will open this summer and will run for several months, but it needs some help to get to put it together. Curator Brian Walsh would welcome anecdotes and oral testimonies, along with items and memorabilia relating to Irish involvement in the Olympics.

New edition of the Grenham bible: Tracing your Irish Ancestors by John Grenham is widely regarded as the one absolute-must-have book on genealogical research in Ireland. Its fourth edition, which embraces online research, is scheduled for publication next month. Publisher is Gill & Macmillan. 624pgs.

From Cricklewood to Clapham Junction: The Irish Post carried an interesting article about the modern wave of emigrants to London. Seems today's young Irish are more likely to head south of the Thames than to traditional 'Irish' strongholds such as Cricklewood.

'Tis the season to update your website: Thankfully, this is not mandatory, but you could be forgiven for thinking there was some compulsion behind the recent spate of website overhauls. The National Archives of Ireland started it off, and I mentioned it a few days back. It gets top marks for a very good looking new site, but I still think the sign-posting isn't quite as kind to new visitors as it should be. Nonetheless, the searchable catalogue, which I've been playing around with this weekend, is fab. The Certificate of Irish Heritage has also had a face-lift and is looking very smart. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission site is also striding into 2012 with a new look and will be adding more enhancements shortly. These include a facility to search on the 'additional information' field of the database, which could be extremely useful for identifying one deceased soldier from another with a similar name.

Quaker death records 1849 now online: FindMyPast Ireland has released a small collection of Irish death records from the Quaker Annual Monitor 1849 which also goes by the snappy title of Obituary of the Members of the Society of Friends in Great Britain and Ireland for the year 1848. Some entries provided limited detail (typically name, age, date of death, meeting house attended and marital status) but some are accompanied by quite lengthy eulogies written by the elders of the deceased's Meeting House.

And a big thank you to Family History Monthly:
Imagine my surprise to open the February issue of Family History Monthly magazine and find this very blog under the Blog Spot light. I had no idea! Fortunately it was a glowing review! Many thanks to Jen and the FHM team.