Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
It’s an occupational hazard for me that when a famous person has an Irish name but is not Irish, I wonder how far back their Irish ancestry is. You’d have to be under a rock to have missed the headline film of the summer: The Odyssey, directed by one Christopher Nolan. Let’s take a look…
This post covers September & October. I’ve removed the September content now it’s over! October The La Mancha Murders in Malahide as part of Fingal Festival of History. This is a repeat of a talk I did in March. Saturday 3rd October in the old Carnegie Library in Swords. This is now fully booked with…
Living DNA has been around for a decade now. They are based in the UK and heavily market on having better ethnicity breakdowns for the UK and Ireland. At a now defunct trade fair called Back to Our Past in 2017, they had a stand and were accepting uploads of tests from other sites, so…
Earlier this week, I posted on my socials about the older National Archives genealogy site being offline. Courtesty of the WayBack Machine, which has many captures, you can still navigate parts of that site. This was subsequently confirmed with the following notice on their main “search the collections” page. I’m pleased to hear they are…
Until now, I’ve shied away from writing anything about using AI tools for genealogy. I’ve shied away from using it too. I’m not using at all in my professional work. There’s lots of reasons for this including the two biggies: It’s also important to clarify what we mean by “AI”, which is really just a…
One of the lovely features of the 1926 census is the detail of people’s employers. My great-grandfather, Fred Walters, worked in Clerys Department store on the then newly renamed O’Connell St. I knew he had worked there but not when he started. The census told me he was already there in 1926. Clerys was an…
So I’ve been playing about with a new tool for analysing your family tree and it’s worth telling you about now. It’s been around a few months and I’ve been a guinea pig user for the developer while they tweak and add new features. Gedminer is free to use. You upload a gedcom file. It…
The Secrets of our DNA – how genetics has changed the world is a new book by Professor Turi King. She is best known for leading the identification of Richard III’s skeleton in Leicester. She also presented the show DNA Family Secrets on BBC with Stacey Dooley. I also know Turi a little and we’ve…
This post covers June, July and August. Most of these are in-person talks which won’t be recorded. June Starting your Family tree. Friday 12th June for Lansdowne and District Residents Association in Sandymount Community Centre at 19:30. Book through LADRA. Using DNA tests for family history. Wednesday 17th June for Mayo Genealogy Group online. July…
The current issue of Family Tree Magazine features an article by yours truly on the 1926 census. If you’re a member of Family Tree Plus, you can also watch back my companion talk from last month. If you’re not a member, you can get a free 7 day trial.