Category: Genealogy.ie

April 2026 marks a milestone for Irish genealogy with the release of the 1926 Census records – the first census after the establishment of the Irish Free State.

This census captured a population of 2,971,992 (a 5.3% decrease from 1911) and provides crucial insights into post-independence Ireland, with 92.6% identifying as Catholic and 18.3% reporting Irish language ability.

For genealogists, these records offer comprehensive household information including names, relationships, birthplaces, occupations, and marriage details – bridging the significant gap between the 1911 Census and later records.

The National Archives’ digitisation project is converting over 700,000 return sheets using advanced scanning and transcription technology, ensuring these valuable documents will be freely available online.

The genealogical community has long anticipated this release, particularly as other countries have made comparable records available earlier. For many researchers with elderly relatives, these records may provide the final pieces in family history puzzles that span the formative years of the Irish state, while for others it will be a starting point in their journey to discover their Irish heritage.

Who will I look up first? For me, it will be my paternal grandparents who died tragically within three months of one another in December 1944 and February 1945, when my father was just nine years old. I’ve long wondered where Mary Catherine Foley and John Francis Hassett were living and working in 1926, just four years before their marriage. This represents a significant gap in my research, and I’m eager to discover whether they were still in their birthplaces of Cromane, Co. Kerry and Knockanean near Ennis, Co. Clare, or if they had already begun their journeys toward Dublin where they eventually wed in 1930, before they ended up in Donegal, Kerry and then Cork.

When released in April 2026, the 1926 Census will serve not only as a powerful genealogical resource but also as a window into the social and economic landscape of Ireland in its early years of independence. Who will you look up first?

That is Happy Christmas and Happy New Year in Gealic.

We want to wish all our customers, subscribers, website visitors and family historians all the best for the coming weeks and for 2025.

Below are some pictures of Christmas in Dublin, which we hope you will enjoy.

The Genealogy.ie team.

Christmas decorations in St. Stephen’s Green shopping centre

Christmas on Grafton Street, one of Dublin’s main shopping streets

Christmas tree at The Temple Bar

Kildare Village is a designer outlet shopping centre just outside Dublin with 100+ leading luxury boutiques.

Last weekend, it offered free shuttle busses to the 25,000 US fans who came to Dublin for the 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic (ALCFC) between Georgia Tech and Florida State University.

This gave the visitors a chance to experience Kildare Village and enjoy some unique  Irish events that were organised, such as a performance by the modern Irish dance group Prodijig, an Irish coffee-making demonstration, and opportunities to explore their Irish heritage.

For the latter, Kildare Village partnered with Accredited Genealogists Ireland (AGI), of which Genealogy.ie/Jillian van Turnhout is a member. AGI represents the interests of people who are professionally employed in the field of genealogy and  monitors the standard of their work on behalf of their clients. Genealogists cannot just join and become a member, they have to affiliate first and go through a rigorous process inclusing assessment of work carried out.

The talk on family history research took place in a beautiful room, normally used for personal shopping. Our Jillian van Turnhout was the main speaker and in her presentation she touched on various topics, including the not very well-known fact that many Irish people emigrated well before the Great Famine. Also attending were AGI members Anne-Marie Smith and Joan Sharkey.

After the prentation AGI provided free consultations.

Most Irish family history researchers will be familiar with Thom’s Directories. In 1850, Henry Shaw tried to launch a competing publication, the New City Pictorial Directory. It was not a commercial success, and the 1850 edition was destined to be the only one. It provides a unique insight of the city in 1850 though because – as the title suggests – it was pictorial.

Henry Shaw had established himself as a newspaper publisher in 1848. He was not the only one to do so; thanks to technical advances of printing technology, a lot of newspapers were established in the nineteenth century. Many would only exist for a short time. Shaw’s The Commercial Journal and Family Herald existed from 1848 to 1872. The newspaper appears to have been off to a good start, claiming 9,000 subscribers (according to Shaw).

In 1850, as mentioned above, he published a city directory. This was possibly to expand his publishing business, or perhaps to promote his newspaper as subscribers to the full edition (there was a cheaper single sheet edition) received a free copy of the directory.

The directory contained:

• Review of 1849
• Calendar of 1850 events
• List of government departments
• Banking directory
• Law directory
• Street directory
• Alphabetical list of nobility, gentry, merchants and traders

The unique part of the directory were the drawings. It displays many beautiful engravings of street frontages. Being a commercial publication however, many residential areas did not get such treatment and only those businesses who took out an advertisement received a detailed drawing of their premises, as opposed to just an outline. All main streets were included. But also, in some cases, smaller streets, if a business in such street would have taken out an ad. If this was not the case, no pictorial view of these smaller streets would be included.

If your ancestors owned a business in the city of Dublin in 1850, you might be lucky and a drawing of their premises might exist.

The National Library of Ireland and Marsh’s Library have a copy in their holdings. We have also seen second hand copies being offered on various websites.

Genealogy.ie was established in 2017 and in addition to research for our clients, we have been creating various content such as articles, posts, magazines, videos and news items right from the start. If you follow us on Facebook, Instagram or X (formerly Twitter), you will have seen our short messages about Ireland, genealogy, local history and more. Some are educational, some are informative, whilst others are just meant to entertain. Our magazine and blog offer short articles. We release the magazine twice a year, and in between, we publish blogs. You may subscribe to receive notifications for either of them. Almost 600 of you have already done so!

We also write longer articles that require extensive research. Typically, we write one article per year that we share with a specific publication. Our work has been featured in various family and local history magazines and journals, both in Ireland and North America.

Of course, a new article would always be the topic of a blog, and as a subscriber you would have been notified. But if you haven’t been a subscriber from the beginning, or you are just reading this blog post, did you know you can access all articles we have published via our website? You can download the articles we published until 2020 free from our website. After 2020 our policy changed: to support the publishing organisations, we provide links to their websites where you can purchase the magazine or journal where we are featured.

If you find yourself with some time on your hands during the upcoming Christmas break, why not have a look by clicking on the picture below? The very first article mentioned on the page is brand new, it was only published in November 2023.

 
Enjoy, and have a great Christmas and a fantastic 2024.
 

 
The Genealogy.ie team.

Since 1986, Accredited Genealogists Ireland (AGI) is an accrediting and representative body for professional genealogists in Ireland.

The role of the AGI is twofold:
1. Representing the interests of people who are professionally employed in the field of genealogy.
2. Monitoring the standard of their work on behalf of their clients.

Anyone wishing to become a member, must be a professional genealogist, living and working on the island of Ireland, research Irish sources and cannot be full-time employed outside the field of genealogy.

There is a strict process to become a member. The first step is to become an affiliate. This involves an application outlining the number of years active in genealogical research for a fee; research experience, experience in related fields, and courses attended. It should be noted that experience is a requirement; but courses are not. In addition, the applicant should submit a dissertation or essay of approximately 1,000 words to demonstrate their knowledge, ability and communication skills

The next step is to become a full member. Admission to membership is based on the recommendations of an independent Board of Assessors. This board will assess work completed by the applicant for a fee-paying client. If successful, the genealogist will be allowed to display the AGI membership badge as a credential of their professionalism and quality of work.

I am happy to report that my submission was successful and that I am now a fully accredited genealogist!

Íslendingabók means “Book of Icelanders”. It is the title of a book, but in this post, we mean an online database created by the biotechnology company deCODE in Iceland. The aim of this Reykjavik-based company is to use population genetics studies to identify variations in the human genome associated with common diseases. So the purpose was medical. A large number of Icelanders participated in their research.

In 2003 the database the company had created was made available online but with limitations on who can see what. It very quickly became a very important genealogical database for Icelanders. To get access you must get a password, which you can only get if you have an Icelandic social security number. Users can see information on themselves, as well as all their ancestors, plus all descendants of their grandparents and great-grandparents. They can also see how they are related to anyone born after 1700 in Iceland.

The following information is available in the database:

• Names, birth and death dates, and places of parents
• Names, birth and death dates, and places of siblings
• Names, birth and death dates, and places of partners
• Names, birth and death dates, and places of children

In February 2020 the database held data on 904,000 people. The current population of Iceland is only around 400,000 and it is estimated that only about 1.8 million people ever lived on the island, since its settlement in the 9th Century. It holds information on 95% of all people born in Iceland since 1700!

The wide scope of people that users can see information on, meant that sometimes people found family members they did not know existed. Sometimes, that was a family secret or something that people had tried to hide. So not everyone was delighted with this resource!

Apart from family history research, the database also helps people check potential partners: Iceland has a very small population on a relatively remote island (at least it was before airplanes became widely used). And that means that many Icelanders are (closely) related to each other.

The Irish Family History Society (IFHS) is a voluntary non-profit making organisation, established in 1984. It is based in Ireland, but open to anyone who is interested in looking to trace their Irish roots, wherever in the world they are based. Every year the Society brings out a journal, full of informative articles. In Volume 37, our Michael van Turnhout contributed an article.

The article is about “Massy’s Estate and Killakee House”. Massy’s Estate is now an “urban forest”, but once was the location of a 36-room mansion with lavish gardens. The article traces its history and the histories of the various families associated with it, including successful businessmen, politicians, and nobility. And it even contains a murder!

You can buy a copy of the journal directly from the Irish Family History Society, via their online shop. The link below brings you to their website.

IFHS Online Shop

A few months ago, a window of opportunity to travel opened up here in Ireland. Our own Michael van Turnhout decided to visit his family in The Netherlands. The last time he visited his mother had been in January 2020, and the opportunity to visit was warmly welcomed.

Cover of 1939 Phone Book

One thing he had promised his mother was that during his stay, he would bring her to some of the old addresses she had lived as a child, including the address where she was born. As her family had moved within a year of her birth, she could not remember it, nor had ever visited it. Thanks to some pre-travel research, we had discovered the address. This was not as easy as it sounds, as most cities and towns in The Netherlands renumbered their streets at some stage after the Second World War. So whilst we had an address, that address no longer exists. We just knew the street, which unfortunately for us is a very long one. It took the combination of a number of sources (newspaper, land registry, and municipal archives, old phonebooks and even a war diary of a local published online) to find it.

Address where Michael van Turnhout’s mother was born. Modern dwelling to the left, old company premises in white to the left.

The house itself had been replaced by a more modern dwelling, but the hall behind it – where Michael’s grandfather ran a milk business – still exists, albeit that it has been converted into a separate house.

Spurred on by this trip, Michael’s mother produced an old photo album that she had inherited from her mother, his grandmother. The pictures had been added without any comment and in a seemingly random manner. It was (relatively) easy to recognise Michael’s mother and her brother as babies, children, and young adults. But there were also lots of pictures of his aunt, who had died at a very young age before he was born. Michael had seen pictures of his maternal grandmother before, but was amazed to see pictures for the first time of his grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother. The oldest pictures were 100 years old!

Great Grand Parents – before 1925

There were many other family members. It was only possible to put names to the many faces thanks to the amazing memory of Michael’s mother. Michael took of course many notes, and is now in the process of cataloging the collection, preserving the information.

Prayer Card for Theo and Arie Klever

Michael’s mother also told the sad story of two of her nephews, Theo and Arie Klever. During the Second World War, they joined the resistance against the Germans who had occupied The Netherlands. Their local resistance group was however betrayed. When the Germans tried to arrest the group, a firefight resulted in the death of  Theo. As several German soldiers had been killed too, out of revenge, the Germans executed 7 young men, some not even attached to the group. Arie was one of them. Both Theo and Arie were only in their twenties, and this happened just a few months before the end of the war. The story of the betrayal has been turned into a book and later also a documentary (in Dutch).

If you get the chance to visit a member of (a) previous generation(s) of your family this Christmas, why not ask them if they have any old family photo albums? And if they do, why not take some time to go through the pictures, ask as many questions as you can and take copious notes.

THE TEAM AT GENEALOGY.IE WISHES YOU A HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND A FANTASTIC 2022!

The National Archives of Ireland is Ireland’s repository for records relating to administrations, Public Records (administrative, court, and probate records), and records of Government Departments and their agencies.

Recently the NAI agreed that an organisation that had handed over their old archives to the National Archives, would be allowed to film them. Very unusually, it allowed the archives to be taken from its offices for the duration of the project. Filming them on the premises of the NAI would mean spending a long time there. Because of COVID-19 this was not considered best practice from a health point of view.

Taking the opportunity, Genealogy.ie was asked to digitise the 20 boxes of archives, with due care.

The archive consists of documents, pictures, certificates, logbooks, etc. in many different formats and sizes. Some were individual documents, some stapled together and others were in book form.

To be able to cope with the vast amount of archive material Genealogy.ie decided to invest in some proper equipment, which you can see in the pictures below. It comprises a high-resolution camera, mounted in a stand. In manual mode, there is a handy separate remote control button to take a picture. But there is also an automatic mode, which takes a picture every 5 seconds.

The software that comes with it allows you to crop and adjust the pictures and export them in a number of different formats, includes searchable PDF. This way, not only are the archives copied, but also digitised.

Even with the new equipment, the project will take about 3 weeks to complete.