Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
Readers of my blog will know that I often review relevant books for Irish genealogy, history and DNA research. This review is a little bit different. I haven’t been a regular computer gamer since my teens. I used to play Monkey Island and other investigative computer games on pc with my late Dad. It was…
As part of an ongoing series for Family Tree Magazine, I’ve reviewed RootsMagic10. It’s one of the market leading softwares for family history. I was completely new to it so was able to offer a fresh perspective. My article is in the edition on sale right now, online and in shops. There’s also an online…
Last week I joined the crew & passengers of the MV Sylvia Earle aboard their Luck of the Irish cruise around Ireland, which is run by Aurora Expeditions. I felt like I was following in the footsteps of my seafaring Joyce ancestors! Although the voyage started in Dublin, I actually took the train across Ireland…
When you work in a rapidly developing field like genetic genealogy, books go out of date. This book was originally published in 2019 and I read & reviewed it then. A new edition has been published this year and it is substantially meatier than its progenitor. The same group of authors worked on the revised…
A couple of years ago, I struck genealogical gold. We all have touchstones: things we would ideally like in our family history. Some people want royalty, but I’m a bit weird. I wanted bigamy. My great-grandfather’s first cousin, Richard Kent, was a bigamist. I wrote about it for Family Tree Magazine, in my first published…
I was over in the Representative Church Body Library* last week in Churchtown. This is the main library for the Anglican church in Ireland and it’s where we go to look at original Church of Ireland parish records for the 26 counties in the Republic. Surviving digitised records for Dublin are online at Irishgenealogy.ie and…
I’m delighted to announce two DNA workshops at Fingal Local Studies & Archives in June and July. Spaces will be limited so that I can give personal attention to each participant, who will need to have already taken a DNA test and bring a device or be able to access their results on the day.…
I specifically want to address three myths about genealogy: two are specific to Ireland and one is more general. The first is the very persistent myth is that “all the Irish records were destroyed in a fire”. Like many good myths, there’s an element of truth in it. There was a fire and records were…
One of the areas that Rootstech could improve on is more books. I love buying books about my work and I’m always trying to build my reference library further. This year saw the release of a new book written by Michael S. Ramage & Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais (amongst others) and published by the National…
As an Irish genealogist, I spend a lot of time explaining context. This comes in many forms. In reports, I have paragraphs to help clients understand different sources like Griffith’s Valuation or the Tithe Applotment books. I contextualise census material by explaining that the building a family lived in housed other families in a number…