Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
I’ve blogged before about the importance of the Valuations Office for genealogical research in land records. Read my post last year on it here. Hot on the heels of the GRO move (mentioned in my last newsletter), Tailte Éireann has announced the Valuations Office is moving to the Registry of Deeds building on Henrietta St…
I enjoy a good genealogical mystery book and have kept up with M. J. Lee’s Jayne Sinclair series. I was surprised to find The Salford Sioux is the 11th in the series – I’ve read them all but I haven’t done a review in a while. Jayne Sinclair is a solitary Manchester-based genealogist who hasn’t…
I really enjoyed presenting this recent class for the International Insitute of Genealogical Studies so thought I’d share it here too. The last imperial family of Russia, headed by Tsar Nikolai II, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 in Ekaterinburg. Rumours that some members had survived persisted throughout the 20th century and were only…
Readers of my blog will know that I’m very interested in Irish Quakers and I wrote my MA dissertation on them. They were a distinct community in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with their own rules, schools, businesses and religious life. Quite fascinating. I presented a webinar on this research yesterday for Legacy…
In my DNA work, I often need to trace living members of families to ask them to take target tests. So when Cheri Hudson Passey’s new book Genealogy in Reverse: Finding the Living, A practical guide for all genealogists appeared in my letterbox, I was interested. Genealogical Publishing sent me this book for free and…
Readers of my blog will know that I often review relevant books for Irish genealogy, history and DNA research. This review is a little bit different. I haven’t been a regular computer gamer since my teens. I used to play Monkey Island and other investigative computer games on pc with my late Dad. It was…
As part of an ongoing series for Family Tree Magazine, I’ve reviewed RootsMagic10. It’s one of the market leading softwares for family history. I was completely new to it so was able to offer a fresh perspective. My article is in the edition on sale right now, online and in shops. There’s also an online…
Last week I joined the crew & passengers of the MV Sylvia Earle aboard their Luck of the Irish cruise around Ireland, which is run by Aurora Expeditions. I felt like I was following in the footsteps of my seafaring Joyce ancestors! Although the voyage started in Dublin, I actually took the train across Ireland…
When you work in a rapidly developing field like genetic genealogy, books go out of date. This book was originally published in 2019 and I read & reviewed it then. A new edition has been published this year and it is substantially meatier than its progenitor. The same group of authors worked on the revised…
A couple of years ago, I struck genealogical gold. We all have touchstones: things we would ideally like in our family history. Some people want royalty, but I’m a bit weird. I wanted bigamy. My great-grandfather’s first cousin, Richard Kent, was a bigamist. I wrote about it for Family Tree Magazine, in my first published…