Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
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…
Clients frequently ask me to collaborate with them on their family history. People have usually done a little bit themselves and then get stuck. I come in to help untangle and correct their homework! The proliferation of hint systems in online commercial genealogy sites means that it’s very easy for an error to be replicated,…
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…
It was a great professional year. I solved a number of unknown parentage cases – some of which took more than a year of work. I also wrote full family histories for multiple clients and worked on many projects helping people gain Irish citizenship and solve smaller mysteries. Here’s some highlights in numbers. 61 classes/lectures…
I’ve talked before about the pros and cons of different kinds of hints on the various commercial genealogy sites. Today I want to write about Ancestry’s ThruLines, which are a DNA hint. When you get your results, if you attach your DNA to your tree, it will look for matches who could be related through…
Many of us have taken a DNA test to advance our family history research. Some people have been able to go further and test parents too. But have you considered testing your parents’ cousins? This was something I did right from the start, as my budget allowed. My mother’s lovely cousin, sadly no longer with…
It’s Mental Health Awareness week in Ireland. Prompted by my recent review of a book about Grangegorman Mental Hospital, I’ve been re-reading my great-grandmother’s medical file. Mary Bradley, née Lawless, spent the last 10 years of her life at the hospital following suicidal thoughts. She had been widowed young in her 50s with 4 children.…
For St. Patrick’s Day 2024, I’m taking a look at a new collection on Ancestry of Guinness records. Guinness, in case you didn’t know, is one of Ireland’s most famous exports. The Guinness Store House is a top tourist attraction in Dublin. I actually don’t much like the black stuff, but I do recognise the…
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…