Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
Now that the excitement of the census release has begun to settle, we’re starting to get into the nitty gritty of it. We now have options for accessing it on a few different sites I know some readers of my blog will love a good source citation, so here’s how to understand and cite the…
Barely a wet week has passed since the 1926 census has launched and Ancestry has already got a trancribed version on their site. Presumably this will be the same transcription as on the National Archives version because they couldn’t have re-transcribed it themselves so quickly and the Creative Commons licence means they can just take…
The Story of Us is a companion book released on Monday to tie in with the launch of the 1926 census. It’s edited by Orlaith McBride (Director of the National Archives) and John Gibney of the Royal Irish Academy. The book is comprised of 29 short chapters, divided into 4 sections: The chapters are authored…
I don’t want to be negative about this amazing new free resource, but inevitably when a large dataset is transferred from handwritting to transcriptions and digital images, errors creep in. The newly released data was created with machine reading, OCR technology and human input. You can read more about the process in new book The…
It’s here 100 years to the day at 00:01 on 18th April 2026, the National Archives has gifted genealogists and historians with the long-awaited public release of the Irish Free State’s 1926 census. The link to search is here. It’s free to access and you don’t need to register an account. What’s on it? This…
It is here at last. I’ve been wanting to see this census since 1999. The link to search on is this one. The old census site remains active but does not have 1926 on it. I expect them to take it down in due course, which will cause all the links from trees on the…
As a new nation in 1922, Ireland went on a spree of renaming things. This happened at a county level (Kings County became Offaly, Queen’s County became Laois) and town level (Kingstown reverted to Dun Laoghaire, Queenstown went back to Cobh) – are you sensing a theme here? It also happened with street names, mostly…
It’s time for another book review. Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m keen on people getting the fundamentals of how to research your family tree right. This isn’t a topic that fills us with excitement but it’s important. Dr Karen Cummings (owner of Pharos Tutors) is someone I know professionally and I…
With the excitement about the release of the 1926 census on 18th April, you shouldn’t be surprised that most of April & May sessions are about it. Each one will be tailored for the area I’m speaking in. April (all about the 1926 Census) Tuesday 28th April in Swords, hosted by Fingal Local Studies &…
MyHeritage has introduced a new facet to their family trees. Users can already display trees as a descendancy chart, a pedigree view or a fan chart. I mostly use the pedigree view as a first step and then the descendancy one if a tree I’m looking at doesn’t show much in the other view. Fan…