FindMyPast.com launches Starter sub with 70% off

A new 'Starter' subscription has been launched by FindMyPast.com aimed primarily at family historians in the United States just starting their research.

The launch offer comes with a whopping 70% discount for those that take out the 12-month option, reducing its cost from $114.50 to just $34.95. (The monthly option does not attract a discount; it costs $9.95 a month.)

As well as access to FindMyPast's online family tree builder, the Starter subscription includes more than 2.9 billion records including:

• US immigration & travel records: This collection includes records of people leaving the UK between 1890 and 1960, and passenger lists from states including Florida and California
  
• US birth, marriage and death records: Notable record sets in our Starter Package are CA births and marriages, NY marriages and SC deaths. FindMyPast's comprehensive marriage collection, spanning 360 years, is not included (see Premium)
  
• US Newspapers: Historic newspapers are a valuable – and often underutilized – resource for family history researchers. They contain family announcements, details about criminal cases, military commendations and much more.
  
• UK & Irish Censuses: Essential for Americans with Irish or British heritage.
  
• Access to FMP's free collections of US census records and Irish Parish Catholic Registers.

For comparison, the regular 'full' package, now known as Premium, costs $239.40 for a year or $19.95 for a month, and gives access to more than 8 billion records.

Offaly ancestors? Check out this new online archive

A new online catalogue has been launched at Offaly History Archives to bring together an online catalogue of archival collections currently held in various repositories in County Offaly and elsewhere.

In addition, the site will feature free digitised resources. The first collection to be released comes from the Digby Irish Estates Papers (the originals are in Dorset, England), which is a vital resource for those researching the county in the 19th and 20th centuries. More than 1,000 images of the annual reports dating from 1857 to 1872 for the Geashill Estate are ready for viewing.

I've just been looking at the Annual Report for 1861 and reading about an on-going project of refurbishment to tenants' cottages, and (unconnected) the eviction of eight men identified as 'Ribbonmen'. The men are named as Loughlin Kelly of Ballina, Henry Bryan of Cross Keys (public house), John Clibborn of Clonmore, John Helion of Killurin, Darby Flanagan of Pigeonhouse, John Whelaghan of Colehill and William Grumby of Dalgan. They were, according to the land agent writing the report, conspiring to kill the landlord's son.

The new online archive is described as a work in progress and we can expect more finding aids and images and descriptive lists to be added to the database on a regular basis.

FindMyPast delivers big package of British, US and New Zealand record collections

FindMyPast has added a mixed bunch of new collections and updates to its database over the last week. None of them is specifically Irish, but all will hold details of Irish emigrants and their descendants.

Here are brief details and links to the new record sets:

British Army Casualty Lists 1939-1945
Over 1.1 million War Office records covering Officers and Nurses and Other Ranks are held in this collection. The lists cover individuals reported as killed in action, wounded, prisoner of war, missing, died of wounds, missing believed killed, dangerously ill, and involved in accidents.

United States Marriages
More than 4million marriage records have been uploaded to the dataabase in the latest instalment of updates to this collection, which spans 1650 to 2010 and includes entries from nearly every state. This particular tranche of new records includes significant additions from Arkansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. The records include marriage date, bride and groom names, birthplace, birth date, age, and residence as well as father’s and mother’s names.

United States, Transatlantic Migration
Consisting of 127 publications, this record set holds information about more than 30,000 migrants from Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Germany and the Netherlands who cross the Atlantic between the late 1500s to the early 1900s. Details may include birth countries, place and date of embarkation, ages, occupations, and information about spouses and children.

United States, Early American Families
This collection is made up of 140 publications containing over 86,000 records of the early settlers of America and their descendants. You may be able to learn the birth and death years of your ancestors, as well as other family names and significant locations.

United States, Early American Vital Records
With more than 14,000 records spanning the 1600s to the early 1900s, this collection holds birth, marriage, and death register entries, as well as publications detailing gravestone inscriptions, wills, and the military dead of the American Revolutionary War.

United States, Connecticut Town Vitals, The Barbour Collection
This collection is made up of 55 volumes holding more than 18,000 birth and death dates, children's names, and other personal details.

New Zealand Birth Index
The Index has been updated with an additional 19,000 records of people born at least 120 years ago.

New Zealand Marriage Index
More than 8,000 records have been added.

New Zealand Death Index
Over 21,000 records have been added to this Index.

Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives: latest updates

The volunteer team of Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives has uploaded the following records during the second half of August:

ANTRIM/WICKLOW Genealogy Archives - Military & Constabulary
Badge Of Merit 1852 - Robt HAMILTON

1870 Burial Receipt. Click for full image.
Photo courtesy of Joyce Tunstead and IGP-web.

DUBLIN Genealogy Archives - Burial Records
Assorted Burial Records/Receipts

KILKENNY Genealogy Archives - Headstones
St. Canice, Kilkenny (part)

LIMERICK Genealogy Archives - Newspapers
Assorted Articles from Clonmel Gazette 1785/6

MAYO Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Aghamore New Cemetery (part)
Cong Abbey (part)

SLIGO Genealogy Archives - Headstones
Sligo Cem. Middle Part, Section F (M-W)

WICKLOW, Genealogy Archives
Photos – Sub Constable Robt. Hamilton
Headstones – Greenane, Main Cemetery

New: 2016 Maynooth Studies in Local History series

The 2016 titles in the highly acclaimed Maynooth Studies in Local History series have been published by Four Courts Press.

The five volumes feature studies relating to Antrim, Cork, Derry, Waterford and Westmeath, as follows:

• The Nugents of Westmeath and Queen Elizabeth's Irish primer, by Denis Casey
  
• The world of Thomas Ward: sex and scandal in late-17th-century Co. Antrim, by Eamon Darcy
  
• The committal of two Mallow children to an industrial school in 1893, by Martin McCarthy
  
• Sir John Keane and Cappoquin House in time of war and revolution, by Glascott Symes
  
• Derry Labour in the age of agitation, 1889–1923: vol. 2, Larkinism and syndicalism, 1907–23, by Emmet O'Connor
  

Presented in paperback and with around 60 pages, each of the books is on sale via Four Courts Press at €8.95 (incl. discount). Click the book covers below to learn more about each volume.

RootsIreland adds 40,000 Wexford RC baptism records

RootsIreland.ie has added 40,000 transcriptions (and links to images, where available) for the following County Wexford parishes:

Wexford RC parish – 1686-1815 and 1838-1883: Transcriptions of register entries up to the end of 1880 are linked to the images held on the National Library of Ireland's RC Registers website. Images to match the transcriptions covering 1881 to 1883 are not on the NLI site.

Ballygarrett RC parish – 1830-1863 and 1865-1899 : Transcriptions of register entries up to the end of 1863 are linked to the images held on the National Library of Ireland's RC Registers website. The later batch of baptism registers are not part of the NLI collection.

You can view all the County Wexford sources in the database here.

Ancestors from Cork? Free genealogy guide launched

The Local Studies team of Cork County Libraries has published a 32-page booklet to help beginners explore their ancestral heritage in the county.

The guide, Walking in the Footsteps of Your Ancestors, is filled with carefully focussed information about local genealogical record collections and provides tips and direction for the budding family historian genealogist. It's well presented, too, with images of birth certificates and census returns and maps and so on, and comes together in an attractive and neat package.

It's free, and is available in hard copy from all County Cork branch libraries. Alternatively, it can be viewed online or downloaded as a pdf from the County Cork Libraries Local Studies page.

Online launch: Irish birth, marriage & death registers

Next Thursday, 8 September, will be a red-letter day for Irish genealogy.

The General Register Office's historical birth, marriage and death registers will be launched online on that date, joining the GRO Index and a collection of church records on www.IrishGenealogy.ie. Further details will be released early next week. For now, this is all the information being made public.

When this move was first mooted, back in July 2014, it came with an assurance that these records would be accessible free of charge. Subsequent intervention should also have made us quite certain that the records will be subject to the 100-75-50-years rule ie only those births more than 100 years old, marriages more than 75 years ago, and deaths 50 years ago.

I'll bring more news when it's available.

(September looks like it's going to see a bumper delivery for Irish genealogy. Those other record collections I've mentioned rather too many times will be along before the month is out, too.)

UPDATE: 7 September: The updated database has been launched a day early. See my blogpost for the latest updates.

IGRS adds to its growing collection of online resources

The Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) seems to be continually in the news these days, and it's all well-deserved with a stream of new and unique resources and projects being delivered, one after the other to mark the Society's 80th anniversary.

In this instance, the Society has published a new database with links to articles published in the Society's highly-regarded journal, The Irish Genealogist, from 2002 to 2005 inclusive (Volume 11). The database can be searched by name; each entry in the search results links to a downloadeable pdf of the article in which the name appears.

In Volume 11, articles include references to the Society’s Farnham Manuscripts; Willamstown parish, Co. Galway; Griffith’s Valuation and the Poor Law Valuation; Galway Gentry; Cork Protestants; Catholic Converts; Nuns; Faulkner’s Dublin Journal newspaper and the Registry of Deeds. It also contains articles touching in some detail on families named Clare, Burke, Butler, Carew, Crowley, Daly, Fitzgerald, Forbes, Joyce, Keegan, Kenifeck, Langton, O’Brien, McDermott, McHugo, O’Neill. Power and Solsborough. In total, some 8,000 names are referenced.

While this new Volume 11 Names Database can be searched by any researcher, only IGRS members can download the articles. Future digitisation of TIG will be accessible in the same way.

However, the TIG Volume 10 (1998–2001) Names Database, with links to articles, has been freely available to both members and non-members for some 18 months. So, too, is a Names INDEX (no links to articles) covering 1937–2001 inclusive.

All three products – the Volume 1–10 Names Index 1937–2001, the Volume 10 Names Database 1998–2001 and the Volume 11 Names Database 2002–2005 – can be found on the IGRS's award-winning website, IrishAncestors.ie.

Announcing details of the enhanced database collection, IGRS Chairman Steven Smyrl said: “We are thrilled to make The Irish Genealogist more accessible to genealogists and historians by placing it online. We hope in the coming months to extend the online database by uploading volumes published since 2011. The journal contains so much information, not available anywhere else.”

Keeping itself busy and active, the IGRS will be releasing more updates to its growing collection of online resources later this year.

Waterford and Tramore newspaper joins BNA

The latest Irish title to join the British Newspaper Archive is the Waterford Mirror and Tramore Visitor. Distributed on Wednesdays, it published a mixture of local, national and international news and advertisements.

The BNA plans to create an online holding for this paper spanning 1860 to 1910 ie the full extent of its publication.

The initial upload sees full-year editions of the weekly paper available for 1862–1868; 1872; 1884–1886; 1888; 1891–1892; and 1896.

As well as being available via the BNA website, this title has joined the line-up of 123 Irish titles available via FindMyPast's Ireland and World subscriptions.