Irish genealogy, history & heritage events, 5-19 August

Monday 6 August: Public Holiday in Republic of Ireland only. All repositories and libraries closed (except National Library of Ireland's exhibitions). Free genealogy advisory services at National Library and National Archives of Ireland will not operate.

Monday 6 August: The Great Watershed – Belfast before and after the First World War, with Roger Dixon. First of the Eastside Arts Festival 2018 lunchtime lectures. Host and Venue: PRONI, Belfast. 1pm. Free. CANCELLED.

Wednesday 8 August: Carson's betrayal of Women? Unionist attitudes to female suffrage 1912-14, with Jason Burke. Eastside Arts Festival 2018 lectures. Host and Venue: PRONI, Titanic Blvd, Belfast. 1pm. Free. Need to book. Details.

Thursday 9 August: Shellshock in WW1, with Dr Stefanie Linden. Host: Western Front Association, Antrim and Down branch. Venue: PRONI, Titanic Boulevard, Belfast BT3 9HQ. 6:30pm. All welcome. Free. No need to book.

Friday 10 August: The Dreams Must be Dreamed: The life and times of Charlotte Despard, with Philip Orr. Third of the Eastside Arts Festival 2018 lunchtime lectures. Host and Venue: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Titanic Boulevard, Belfast. 1pm. Free, but need to book. Details.

Friday 10 and Saturday 11 August: Celtic Connections Conference. Hosts: The Irish Ancestral Research Association (TIARA) & The Irish Genealogical Society International (IGSI). Venue: Boston Marriott Newton 2345 Commonwealth Avenue, Auburndale, MA, USA. Several Irish-themed lectures will be presented over the two days by well-known Irish genealogists from Ireland, UK and North America. Details.

Saturday 11 August: Researching your family history - a drop-in session with Mayo Genealogy Group. Host and venue: Museum of Country Life, Turlough Park, Castlebar, Co Mayo. 11:30am–1pm. Free.

Monday 13 August: NLI Reading Room and Manuscript Room closed. Venue: National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2. On-going Monday closures are to facilitate extensive redevelopment of the premises. All other services/exhibitons/cafe, including Genealogy Advisory Service, will open at 11am (late opening is to facilitate a staff development meeting) and operate as normal from that time. Details.

Monday 13 August: The Military Service Pensions Collection: Dependants of the War of Independence and Civil War casualties, with Robert McEvoy. Host and venue: Richmond Barracks, off Bulfin Rd, Inchicore, Dublin 8. ‏11am. Tickets €5, includes tea/coffee & scone. Book or purchase at the door.

Tuesday 14 August to Saturday 18 August: Scots-Ulster Reunion & Conference, 5 days of tours, lectures, music, culture, and celebration. Host: Maine Ulster Scots Project. Venue: Bowdoin College, 255 Maine St, Brunswick, ME 04011, USA.  Details.

Thursday 16 August to Sunday 19 August: West Cork History Festival - lectures, performances, screenings (field trips all sold out). Venue: Rosebank, Russagh, Castletownshend Road, Skibbereen, Co. Cork (Rosebank is the the former dower house of the Liss Ard estate, less than a mile outside the town). All presentations/performances are in marquees. Programme and tickets.

Saturday 18 August: Máire Ní Murchú, the bean feasta/wisewoman of Beara, with Niamh Ní Lochlainn. Host Bere Island Project Group. Venue: Bere Island Heritage & Information Centre, Ballinakilla, Bere Island, Co Cork.  2.30pm. Details.

Saturday 18 August: Sharing family history stories, with Penny Bristol-Jones, Eilish Feeley and Marie Gillooly. Host and venue: Roscommon County Library, Abbey Street, Roscommon, Co. Roscommon. 10am to 12:30pm. Free. Details: T 0906 637272. Not suitable for under 12s.

Saturday 18 August: Genealogy workshop, with resident genealogist Lynn Brady. Host and Venue: Glasnevin Cemetery Museum, Finglas Rd, Botanic, Dublin 11. 2pm to 3:30pm. Free but booking required at booking@glasnevintrust.ie. Details.

Sunday 19 August: Family Genealogy Day. Learn how to research or consult a genealogist. Host and venue: Belderrig Community Centre, Belderrig, Ballina, Co. Mayo. 3pm to 5pm. Free. Everyone welcome, although not suitable for under 12s.

Summer savings from Family Tree DNA

There's a 20% discount on offer from Family Tree DNA, and it'll run throughout August.

It applies to a number of different products, but I'm only going to mention three here:

• Family Finder (autosomal DNA) is down from US$79 to US$59, a saving of US$20
• Paternal Ancestry (Y-DNA) is reduced from US$169 to US$129, a saving of US$40
• Maternal Ancestry (Mt-DNA) is reduced from US$199 to US£149, a saving of US$50

For full details of these and all the Summer Savings offers, click the image above.

If you are already a customer of Family Tree DNA, you should log into your account to find even more enticing discounts available on upgrade tests.

GRO's online civil bmd registers: latest on progress

Don't get too excited, now.

Since the last upload of images of GRO's birth, marriage and death registers to IrishGenealogy.ie back in November, the expectation has been that the next tranche would be coming along this summer. That's certainly what I understood, anyway.

It seems the next release is running behind that schedule. The managers of IrishGenealogy.ie are currently anticipating the next batch to be ready for upload in November or thereabouts.

While this may be a bit later than expected, there is some good news within the delay. It is expected that the next batch will include all the outstanding historical records ie Marriage records from 1845 to 1869 and Death records from 1864 to 1877, and the 'top-up' years of Births in 1917, Marriages in 1942 and Deaths in 1967.

In the meantime, if you're desperate for more information than IrishGenealogy's Marriage and Death indexes provide, you might want to check out FamilySearch.org's recently updated collection – Ireland Civil Registration, 1845-1913.

This collection holds Birth records for the period 1864-1913, Marriages for 1845-1870, and Deaths for 1864-1870. There are no images of registers, but the transcriptions include a little more information than IrishGenealogy's simple index provides. See below for an example return from a search of the Marriage Index.

Dublin's Registry of Deeds to fully reopen on 2 August

Following essential maintenance works that have severely restricted researcher access over the last five weeks, the Registry of Deeds on Henrietta Street will be fully open from Thursday 2 August.

The Transcribing Room, which holds memorials of deeds from 1708-1832, reopened on 16 July, but the Transcribing Room Vault, which holds deeds from 1896-1910, has been closed throughout the works period.

All public areas will be accessible from 10am tomorrow..

Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives: latest additions

Below are the files uploaded to Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives (IGPA) in the last two weeks of July. They include a good number of photos + inscriptions of headstones (750 from Mount Jerome Cemetery alone), some transcriptions of baptism registers from the parish of Clones, and several files of transcriptions of memorials in Meath.

100 years of death in the Moloney family,
who rest in Ballylinan/Ballylynan churchyard,
Co Laois. Photo courtesy of IGPA,
William Muldowney and Michael Brennan.
Click image for enlarged view.

The latter relate to photos of headstones that had already been added to IGPA as image-only files; the transcription work has now been carried out by IGPA volunteers.

DUBLIN Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Mount Jerome Cemetery, Parts 201-205

FERMANAGH Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Colaghty (CoI) Graveyard (Additional)

LAOIS Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Ballylinan Graveyard

MAYO Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Aghamore Old Cemetery

MEATH Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Bective, St. Mary's (CoI) Graveyard (Transcribed)
Knockcommon Old Cem., Beauparc (Transcribed)
Castletown Cemetery - New, Right Side (Transcribed)
Castletown Cemetery -  New Left Side (Transcribed)
Navan, St. Mary's (G-H & J-L) (Transcribed)

MONAGHAN & FERMANAGH Genealogy Archives - Church Records
Clones Parish Registers, Baptisms, 1800-1804
Clones Parish Registers, Baptisms, 1805-1808

Death of former AGI President Henry 'Harry' McDowell

Accredited Genealogists Ireland (AGI) has reported the death of one of its founding members and former presidents, Henry "Harry" McDowell.

A professional genealogist since the 1970s, Harry was one of Ireland's longest practising genealogists. He was elected a Fellow of the Irish Genealogical Research Society in 1989, served as President of the County Kildare Archaeological Society from 2000-2004 and was elected a Fellow of AGI in 2011.

In 2015, Dundalgan Press published Irregular Marriages in Dublin Before 1837 – his transcript of the surviving (clandestine) marriage registers of Dublin's Lutheran Reverend Schulze.

You can find out more about Harry and his contribution to Irish genealogy in AGI's tribute here.

RCBLibrary's 'Parish No.1’ (Shrule, Co. Longford) shows range of material available for parish histories

The Representative Church Body Library's
first collection of parish material came from Shrule.
Click image to download list of material.

August's Archive of the Month feature from the RCB Library provides a potted history of the repository and highlights the very first collection of parish material that came into the RCB's custody in 1926.

This early collection is from the Parish of Shule in County Longford and, together with additional materials transferred from the parish in the 1980s and 2010s, has been accessioned as parish collection or P.001.

In the feature, Dr Miriam Moffitt brings a professional historian’s perspective on the content of this particular collection and the array of supporting resources also available in the RCB Library that shine a light on the story of this particular Church of Ireland parish, and its community.

As well as focusing on the surviving content of the Shrule parish record collection itself, including baptismal, marriage and burial registers, the minutes of the vestry and select vestry meetings, preachers’ books, and sundry other materials, she supplements this with detail on the additional information available from such sources as diocesan visitations, magazines and the clerical succession lists, documenting the lives of individual clergy who served in a parish, as well as the rich and now searchable Church of Ireland Gazette which has been digitized and is available to 1936 inclusive here.

July update from Registry of Deeds Index Project

The Registry of Deeds Index Project has been updated with recent contributions from volunteer researchers.

As a result, the main Index now holds 278,873 index entries from 30,604 memorials of deeds. In addition, there are now 60,665 townland index transcriptions, and 18,357 grantor index transcriptions on the site. All are freely searchable.

A page from the Grantors' Index,
just ripe for transcribing!

Would-be contributors should know that transcribing the townland and grantors' indexes does not require any understanding of land transactions. All that is required is to reproduce information from the written index into a simple spreadsheet. Easy peasy.

See right for an example image (taken from microfilm) of the written Grantors' index, 1860-69; you'll see the writing is clear and the details straightforward. These images are available free on FamilySearch.org.

Simply key the details into a spreadsheet or table using the columns displayed and send to the Project Manager, Nick Reddan FIGRS.

PRONI receives 1st Archive Accreditation Award in NI

Congratulations are due to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) after it achieved Accredited Archive Service status – the first such award made in Northern Ireland.

Accreditation is managed by the UK Archive Service Accreditation Partnership, a body which defines good practice and agreed standards for archive services across the UK; its accreditation panel looks at an organisation’s ability to develop, care for, and provide access to its collections, and those areas such as resources and planning which underpin those activities.

PRONI's Director Dr Michael Willis commented: 'This prestigious Award is a significant achievement and milestone for PRONI and I am delighted and proud that PRONI was assessed as reaching the national standard enabling us to be awarded Archive Service Accreditation. This is welcome recognition of PRONI's good practices and quality services and is testimony to the ongoing hard work of all PRONI staff to make PRONI the best archive that it can be!‎'

See a list of the 17 UK institutions who gained Accreditation in the last ASA panel here.

NEHGS's RC Archdiocese of Boston records: latest digital additions

The New England Historic Genealogical Society has added images from 33 volumes of registers from the following seven parishes to its browsable Massachusetts Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, 1789-1900 collection on AmericanAncestors.org:

St. Anthony of Padua (Cohasset) Baptisms, 1886-1900

St. Joseph (Pepperell) Baptisms and Marriages, 1885-1900

St. Patrick (Roxbury) Baptisms and Marriages, 1836-1900; Confirmations, 1871-1900

St. Mary of the Assumption (Brookline) Baptisms and Marriages, 1852-1900; Marriages, 1857-1900; Confirmations, 1855-1900

Mary Immaculate of Lourdes (Newton) Baptisms, 1893-1900

Sacred Heart (Newton) Baptisms, 1890-1900

St. John the Baptist (Quincy) Baptisms and Marriages, 1863-1900; Confirmations, 1868-1900; First Communions, 1863-1900.

If you're not an NEHGS member, you'll find the browsable collection can be accessed free of charge by researchers with a free Guest account. This is easy to set up via the Sign Up button.