A recent article by New York Times columnist and linguist John McWhorter deals with the way Black American English is becoming a language option available to everyone, of whatever ethnic background. (True that, John). In the course of the article he mentions in passing that regional accents are very weak in the US in comparison to elsewhere. Irish regional accents, on the other hand, are one of the glories of humanity. The late actor June Whitfield, well known for her facility with accents, was once asked to sound Ulster, so she took on the Antrim burr common in north Belfast. The director the ..read more

Recently a friend with no interest in genealogy (a “civilian”, to use the technical term) started sending me screenshots and links from the “British Royal Family History” website.  He spent his early years in an English primary school and I sniff resurfacing imperial indoctrination. Gawd armi’ty! The pretext for sending them is awe at the sheer scale of the trees, but also at the legitimacy implied in that unbroken line of inheritance. Hmm. As a card-carrying Irish peasant begrudger, I can’t help noticing all the little gaps and hiccups. William the Conqueror sits there beneath the Anglo ..read more

We just put up much-improved maps of the Catholic parishes of Ireland, the usual all-singing, all-dancing, zoomable, click-through, will do your laundry on request, with a nice auto-complete search. Have a gander. Nice though they are, that’s not what this post is about. I want to confess where the maps came from. The clicky, zoomy part comes from the National Library of Ireland’s parish maps, available for free as part of the government’s open data policy. Ta very much. But where did NLI get the maps? They got them from me. When planning to digitise the parish register microfilms, they asked ..read more

Poor Law Unions are the geographical areas used to collect records of births, marriages and deaths in Ireland. They are still today, astonishingly, based on the old Victorian welfare system. Of course we had to map them. The standard workhouse template The Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 divided the island into 130 districts, each with a workhouse at its heart, usually situated in the largest local market town. A property tax was levied to pay for the operations of the workhouse, so the primary rationale for the area covered was that it should produce the necessary tax take. As a result many Unions ..read more

Poor Law Unions are the geographical areas used to collect records of births, marriages and deaths in Ireland. They are still today, astonishingly, based on the old Victorian welfare system. Of course we had to map them. The standard workhouse template The Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 divided the island into 130 districts, each with a workhouse at its heart, usually situated in the largest local market town. A property tax was levied to pay for the operations of the workhouse, so the primary rationale for the area covered was that it should produce the necessary tax take. As a result many Unions ..read more

The more we immerse ourselves in the online maps, the clearer it becomes that all maps are provisional. Two dimensions can never truly embody four. Contour lines and hill-shading might approximate the third dimension, but the fourth, time, is always out of reach. Every map is only a snapshot of a moving train. What prompted such fortune-cookie musings is growing awareness of the disparities between the place-names listings on the site and the new maps that represent them. The listings are based on the 1851 Townlands Index, which reproduces the standardised place-names used for the 1851 census ..read more

Ballymore After putting up the all-singing, all-dancing, click-and-zoom civil parish maps in July, it occurred to us that the townlands available from Open Street Map (townlands.ie) would fit nicely into them. If we just could get the data down to manageable file-sizes. So we squeezed and squeezed and … Whoopee. All-singing, all-dancing, and now break out the top hat and cane. Then, after repeatedly hunting inside various parish maps for a townland, we thought it would be nice if you could just click on the townland name to drop a marker showing exactly where it was. So we did that. Yeehaww. A ..read more

Irish civil parishes are strange beasts. For good or ill, knowing about them is  essential for Irish research. They came into existence, as simple parishes, after the twelfth century attempt to tame the exotic Irish church and bring it into line with Roman norms. As well as having scandalous marriage laws, outrageous hairstyles, deadly book illustrators and a peculiar way of calculating the date of Easter, the early Irish church disregarded the Imperial Roman territorial divisions of parishes and dioceses. We preferred vast monastic holdings that resembled secular kingdoms in power and we ..read more

I never studied history academically. In fact, my last formal schooling in the subject ended at the age of fifteen. So, like all autodidacts, I have a certain twitchiness about the lacunae in my knowledge (I kept up the Latin). I’ve just finished Dáibhí Ó Cróinín’s Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200 (2nd ed. Longman, 2016), in an attempt to fill in some of the gaps. (Full disclosure: Dáibhí was a school friend of mine more than fifty years ago). The book isn’t always an easy read, though there some nice flashes of impish humour. Puzzling and frustrating What really shines is the treatment of sour ..read more

IrishGenealogy’s civil records section is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Almost single-handedly, it has revolutionised Irish family history research.  By making almost 16 million births, marriages and deaths open and free, it also enabled whole fields of research – into infant mortality, townland history, occupational history – that had been closed books. So all hail IrishGenealogy. Except (there had to be an “except”) … over the years, I’ve regularly noticed peculiarities in the site’s search results: the same search parameters sometimes bring back different results or the result ..read more