Saturday, 26 March 2016

Irish Family History Foundation publishes special issue of Clann to mark the Easter Rising 1916 centenary

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To mark the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, a special edition of CLANN, the free quarterly online newsletter of the Irish Family History Foundation (IFHF), has been released.

It features the results of painstaking genealogy research on the families of the seven signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the declaration read out by Patrick Pearse at the beginning of the insurrection on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916.

The seven signatories, Ceannt, Clarke, Connolly, Mac Diarmada, MacDonagh, Pearse and Plunkett came from very different backgrounds. Their stories touch on twenty counties of Ireland and reveal the diverse strands of 19th-century Irish society.

The research was conducted over several months on behalf of the IFHF by Paul Gorry, a Member of Accredited Genealogists Ireland.

The records used are indicated throughout the 52-page newsletter and illustrate the wide range of sources now available for Irish genealogical research. The various county databases on RootsIreland.ie, the online records* service provided by the IFHF, played a central role in tracing the seven families, but the research involved other online sources as well as original records and printed material.

The special issue is now available for free download from RootsIreland - Clann.


*RootsIreland's records cover baptisms, marriages and deaths of various religious denominations, many civil records and gravestone inscriptions. The database covers most of the RC registers in the National Library of Ireland (NLI) collection, as well as many registers not microfilmed by the NLI. While the end-date of the NLI collection is 1881, many of the registers in the RootsIreland database extend well into the 20th century.