FINDING HEROINES IN FAMILY TREE

Name heroines, and inspired women in Family trees. Research can be very rewarding and with every day that passes, more as more records are being made available.  It is the perfect lifestyle hobby to get into right now as we social distance and remain in our homes.

For those of you interested in conducting family tree research, but not sure where to start, we’ve compiled  advice, that can help you forward.

Who might you find in your family tree?

1.      Talk to your family

This has to be your first port of call. If you’re lucky enough to still have your grandparents in your life, ask them questions. Here are some useful questions to ask them that could lead you further back in your tree and give you a better understanding of what life was like for your ancestors:

• Where and when were you born?

• Who were your parents?

• When did your parents get married?

• Where were your parents from?

• What occupation had your parents?

• What was life like for you as a child?

• What were your grandparents called?

• Do you remember where your grandparents lived?

• What occupation had your grandparents?

• What do you remember about your grandparents?

Ask them about their childhood, parents and grandparents.

Answering these questions should help you when you begin.

Census of Ireland, 1901 and 1911

This is a free resource compiled by the National Archives of Ireland and it is really invaluable to family historians. This is where the questions you asked your grandparents (or older relatives) come in handy. To start, you need to know some details of an ancestor who would have been alive in 1901 and/or 1911. I would recommend starting with 1911 – search using the name of your ancestor and the county they lived in. If your ancestor had an unusual surname, then you might be in luck when it comes to narrowing down the results. However, in most cases, you could get multiple pages of results all for the one name – so how do you narrow it down? Knowing the townland or street where your ancestor lived will really help here. If you know the names of other family members who you’d expect to be living with your ancestor, then this will also help you to narrow down the household.

Knowing the names of your ancestors’ siblings can help you to narrow down the households when looking for your family in the Census, particularly if you have a common surname.

What information will you get from a Census? Hopefully, you will find out more about your ancestors’ family – who they were living with the night the Census was taken in 1911. You may even get another step back in your tree if your ancestor is living with their parents, or even their grandparents! You will find out the ages of each member of the household – although beware, our ancestors’ ages often fluctuated from record to record and may not have been accurate for a multitude of reasons, so don’t place too much trust in this! You will also find out their religion, birthplace, occupation, whether they could read or write, whether they could speak Irish, their marital status, whether they had any illnesses, how many years they were married, how many children they had and their relation to the head of the household.

When you find your ancestor and click on their name you will be brought into a page that has been transcribed and is very easy to read. But, if you’d like to view the original document, then scroll down to the section ‘View census images’ and click on ‘Household Return (Form A).’ To find out about the type of house your ancestor lived in, click into ‘House and Building Return (Form B1)’ and to find out if your ancestor had out-houses such as a cow house or stable, click into ‘Out-Offices and Farm-Steadings Return (Form B2).’ This last form might seem a bit daunting when you go into it first because there are no names and a lot of numbers – it lists the out-houses of not only your ancestors, but also your ancestor’s neighbours. In order to find out which line relates to your family you must go back and check Household Return (Form A) and on the top right-hand corner you’ll see a number. You then find that number down the left-hand column in Form B2 and follow the line over to see what out-houses your family had.

And now that you’ve found your ancestor in 1911, you should be able to find them ten years before that in 1901. Bear in mind that they may have been living at home with their parents in 1901 or in the case of those living in cities, they may have had a different address. This is where knowing other members of the family can come in handy.

Rootschat.com is a very good website if you have questions about your ancestors or the process of family tree research. It is free but you have to create an account. Once you do this, you will have access to over 6 million posts by other family historians and you’ll be able to ask any questions you have, from advice on where to go next to what life would have been like for your ancestor at a particular time.

If you stick at researching your family tree, you’re bound to come across a record/records that are very difficult to read – but you can use this website to ask for help in interpreting handwriting! You can also ask for help in restoring old or damaged photographs . I cannot state enough how useful this website has been to me in my own family tribe  research. There are over 270,000 people signed up to this website, making it one of the busiest and largest free family history forums out there, so do make use of it!

 Military Archives

Irish Military Archives website is a brilliant resource for anyone with ancestors who were in the military or who may have been involved in the 1916 Rising, War of Independence or Civil War. The Military Service Pensions Collection is particularly brilliant as it contains a lot of handwritten personal accounts of what each applicant did during this time, as well as reports and recommendations from people they worked with. The website is very easy to use, and it’s free!

Even if you don’t have any ancestors included in this resource, it’s still worth perusing because the stories, as told by the people who lived them, are incredible. Some of the herstories on our website are based on the testaments given by women in their pension applications. For example, why not read Helena Hegarty’s application; she was involved in keeping a British spy barricaded in her local workhouse for a number of weeks in 1921. Or read about Donegal girl Mary Kane, possibly the youngest Cumann na mBan member, who joined with her mother when she was just ten-years old. These are the kinds of stories you can find in the Military Service Pensions Collection.

Further Research…

Go through old photo albums and when it’s safe to spend time with your grandparents again, ask to see their old photos

If you’ve got this far and you’re eager to find out more about your ancestors contact www.irish-family-search.com

Your local library

When it’s safe to do so again, you should take a trip to your local library for further advice on how to proceed with your family tree. They can often point you in the right direction and sometimes they will have historical records that they can show you as well!

Common obstacles to be aware of:

• Spelling. The spelling of a surname can differ from record to record and this can be very difficult when you’re trying to find an ancestor. This happened mainly because a lot of people used to be illiterate and so the person recording the information would spell the name however they thought it should be spelled, while another person may have spelled it another way again. For example,my ancestors had the surname ‘Donoghue’ but I’ve found records of it spelled as ‘Donohue’,’Donohoe’ and ‘Donaghue.’ It’s also worth keeping in mind that given names too could be spelled differently than what you might expect to find. For example, a person may have went by ‘Kitty’ or ‘Kate’ but used her official name ‘Catherine’ in official documents, or vice versa. Nicknames are not always obvious either. A common name in Ireland used to be ‘Nora(h)’ which actually derived from the name ‘Honora.’

• Ages. As already outlined, it’s quite common to see irregularities when it comes to our ancestors ages. There are many reasons for this, but it is important you keep it in mind when you’re looking through records. It is not completely uncommon, for example, to see your ancestor age twenty years in the space of ten years between the 1901 and 1911 Census! It’s also common to see some white lies when it comes to recording ages on marriage certificates.

Doing your own family history research is so rewarding. You’d be amazed by the stories you could uncover. It is also a fun activity to do with your children/parents and as outlined above, you can do a lot of it these days completely for free! So why not get started now, and maybe you’ll uncover a herstory like suffragette Laura Lennox!