Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genealogist specialising in Irish ancestry
Many of us are researching our ancestry from a great distance. We might not easily be able to travel to the location our ancestors lived and see the local landscape. This may be for many reasons but it’s especially true at the moment, when Covid-19 means we are safer limiting our movements. The above marriage…
For lots of our ancestors, we don’t know what they look like, or what they liked to read or eat. We can look them up in records and gain some information. One of my great-great grandmothers was called Anne Rourke (though her surname is variably spelled in different records). She was born during the Great…
While I’m working away on other people’s genealogy, I always try to do a bit on my own. As of today, I have 3053 people in my family tree. These are people who can be proven to be related to me, either by records (the vast majority) or DNA with records to back it up.…
If you’re a user of Ancestry, and you have a tree attached to your account or DNA results, then you’re familiar with this little leaf which appears to give you hints. These suggestions come in 2 forms. This blog discusses how to know when to accept or ignore them. Record suggestions – Ancestry has millions…
I often find it happens in genealogy that I’m researching someone and discover that it is their birthday or death anniversary on the very day I’m looking them up. Earlier this week, I was adding a distant cousin to my tree, newly discovered, but then found that it was the second anniversary of her death.…
Having read this post on the success of sponsoring DNA tests to break down genealogical brick walls, it is time to sponsor some of my own. Readers of my blog will be aware of my Ure One-Name Study, which seeks to trace all Irish Ures and see how they link to my own. I’ve taken…
Readers of my blog will know about my long-term Ure One Name Study. A sister of my Ure ancestor, Margaret, was married by 1901, and widowed by 1911. She had one son. The husband was not present for the census and up til recently I’d never found any evidence of a marriage or the birth…
We all would love to log on to one of the big commercial sites and find that someone else had already been working on our family tree. The work would be done and we could just enjoy what was found. BUT…the discerning family historian should be certain that the information on this other tree is…
Inspired by my friend Dara’s similar post, I thought I’d take a look at family size in some generations of my family. I’ve gone for 3 generations, as before that, I can’t be certain I know all the siblings in each family. I also took a look at the infant mortality. In my parents’ generation,…
This is my great-grandfather, Peter Reilly. He died when my grandmother was just a young girl and we didn’t know much about him. She always said he came from Cork but on the 1911 Census, his birth place said Dublin. Reilly is a very common surname* and I hadn’t any luck finding a birth cert…