Thursday 14 May 2015

New from Irish Ancestors: birthplace+surname maps

Driscoll births 1864 to 1913, by registration district
Irish Ancestors, the genealogy package created by John Grenham and hosted on the Irish Times website, has recently seen a couple of really useful updates within the Surname section.

First up was a mapping-by-surname facility that's linked to civil registration districts across the island. It delivers a neat visual representation of where a surname is recorded in the civil registration birth indexes between 1864 and 1913. See the image to the right for the result for the surname Driscoll (and click it if you want to visit the page).

Now, on its own that's a pretty handy free tool, but there's more.

To the left hand of the map is a list of all the corresponding registration districts, along with the precise number of births recorded in each one. If you click on the district of interest, you find yourself transported* to the relevant birth index records on the free Irishgenealogy.ie website.

From there, you can browse through the records for details of individual births and note the corresponding registration index references needed to obtain copies of birth certificates.


* Unfortunately, IrishGenealogy.ie won't let you in unless you go through the nonsense of captcha and providing a name (any old name, or even any old initials, will do) in the pretence of making an official application to view the records. It's irritating; count to three and do it.