Let experts help trace Irish roots

By PETER GRIFFIN

Maybe it's for no other reason than to have an excuse to spend the night of March 17 in the Dogs Bollix pub, sinking pints of Guinness and singing "Dirty Old Town" in the best Dublin accent you can muster.

Or maybe it's an innate identification with the Irish culture. After all, thousands of Irish clambered aboard ships bound for New Zealand in the 19th century, looking to leave the misery of poverty and social unrest behind.

Obviously the internet is the natural starting point for tracing your Irish roots, but if my online genealogical searches are anything to go on, you face long nights of unfulfilled surfing looking for leads.

There are a few inherent problems New Zealanders meet in researching their Irish ancestry in general.

Most of the steerage passengers who landed wet and bedraggled here weren't in the mood to elaborate about their backgrounds, stating their place of origin simply as "Ireland." That doesn't help much when you are tracing a common Murphy or O'Malley.

The situation deteriorates further when, despite the frantic efforts of hardworking monks, there are huge gaps in Ireland's church records.

There are no complete census records for Ireland before 1901.

Genealogists generally regard Ireland as one of the most difficult countries to research and, if anything, those difficulties are magnified online.

I decided to put the existing online resources to the test with my own search. Taking the advice of Jan Gow, I started with a regular search engine, in this case google.com.

I entered "County Clare + 1860 - 1900 + John O'Conner + Irish ancestry", Clare being my county of origin, John O'Conner being my great-grandfather - the furthest we have managed to trace on my father's mother's side.

Off I went. "I'm feeling lucky" the search engine prompt taunted. It's disillusioning when Google, which searches billions of web pages, comes up with two pages of O'Conners.

It's worse when most of those prove to be dead-ends. Weeding out the broken links left the homepage of some guy called John O'Conner in Georgia. Nice site, no relation.

A search on irishfamilyrecords.com between 1860 and 1900, surprisingly, revealed no one called John O'Conner at all.

The highly regarded genuki.com site and ireland.com bristled with information, all of which was good background. I found out a great deal of information about John O'Conner's home town of Kilrush.

A helpful reply to an anguished message at irishfamilyrecords.com helped me refine my searching.

"For a person living around 1901 or 1911, you need to check out the census returns and for a person living in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, the Primary Valuation (or Griffith's Valuation) is the one to search.

"For a person living in the 1820s or 1830s, try the Tithe Applotment Books."

Plenty of leads to go on, but tracking down these resources online proved a nightmare.

On the verge of giving up my quest for family knowledge, I received an encouraging e-mail, the result of sending a plea for help to Irish ancestry site tiara.ie.

"I've done extensive research on families from Clare. Send me all the information you have and I'll see what I can find," the e-mail read.

Those words were like sweet Celtic music, but they also taught me a lesson. Forget the hit and miss web surfing, when that proves fruitless just ask for help and let experts do the leg work for you.

Links for finding your family:

Genuki

Irish genealogy

Cuplafocal

Eneclann

Irish Ancestral Research Association

Online archives

Ireland.com

Local Ireland

Churchnet