Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
It is often said that the Irish “do death well”. It is quite normal for people who never met the deceased to attend their funeral because they are a co-worker of a bereaved person. As I’ve been researching and revising death & burial recently for the International Institute of Genealogical Studies, I wrote some material…
We’re well into autumn now in Dublin, the leaves are falling, the evenings are getting darker and we’re anticipating Halloween. Decorated houses are popping up all over my town. According to John Grenham’s website, the surname Death features in Kilkenny, Wexford and Wicklow. In the 1901 census, 31 unfortunate Deaths lived in a variety of…
In researching our family history, we spend a lot of time reading old handwriting. It can be a big challenge. Here are some tips I’ve gathered over 20 years of working in the field. They break down into 2 categories: digitised documents and manuscripts. Let’s look at manuscripts first. If you’re already working with digitised…
I am delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at Rootstech 2024 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’m giving 2 lectures: one is on Irish civil records & the second is dissecting an Ancestry hint. Rootstech is largest genealogy convention in the world. Think ComicCon for genies, professional and hobbyists alike. It takes place on…
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk during Heritage Week at Fingal Local Studies and Archives. An Irish Times journalist came along and I did a small interview with him beforehand. He stayed to hear all the questions and spoke to some people in the audience about their use of genetic genealogy to…
On my recent trip to PRONI in Belfast, I took some time to do some personal family genealogy. I knew my grandmother’s family had lived in Belfast and possibly also Ballymena for a time in her childhood. They came originally from Limerick city and moved north because my great-grandfather, Thomas Henry Guerins, worked for Woolworths…
If you missed part I, here it is. So I made it to PRONI in Belfast. Here’s some logistics. I stayed at the Premier Inn, Titanic Quarter, which is less than 250m from PRONI. It’s a budget hotel but clean, comfortable and sufficient for my needs. The wifi is a little slow but you can…
Readers of my Twitter account were surprised this week when I mentioned that I was going to visit PRONI (the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland) for the first time. I’ve attended talks there before but never actually done research there. I wanted to take some time to explain why this is the case and…
One of my hobbies (yes, I have non-genealogical hobbies) is writing letters to the Irish Times. They’re kind enough to publish them some of the time. Here’s one I wrote before the 2022 census. So imagine my surprise when I was playing around with the new search functionality on the newspapers section of Findmypast (which…
I recently got a copy of a beautiful photo book called On Leaving by photographer David Monahan. The topic is modern Irish emigration. As someone who works with emigration all the time, it’s easy to forget it isn’t just in the past. A sad but lovely thought-provoking book. His website for the project is here.