New zoomable maps for Irish Times's IrishAncestors

Keirnan households in Co Longford in 1854

John Grenham's Irish Ancestors site at The Irish Times has just added a series of new visualisations that map the numbers of households by surname in Griffith's Valuation directly onto zoomable and clickable Google maps.

You can confine the search to a single county (click image right for sample of Keirnan households in Co. Longford) or get an all-Ireland overview (see sample for Keirnan households, with varient spellings).

Click-and-zoom Google maps have also been added to the 'double surname search' facility. The latter can be extremely useful to those family historians who don't know where in Ireland their ancestors came from; it can help pinpoint a geographical starting point for further research.

The sample map for Gibney and Gilshenan households demonstrates this perfectly.

The aim of the visualisations is to provide easy-to-grasp visual evidence of who lived where at the time of Griffith's Primary Valuation (1847-1864). For the moment, the maps are part of the site's pay-per-view reports.