Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
It sometimes surprises those whose Irish ancestors left the Emerald Isle a long time ago that more records are not in the Irish language. The main reason for this is that most of the extant records date from a time when Ireland was ruled by Britain. Administrative records are all in English. We do have…
Ever since the Virtual Treasury of Ireland project launched, genealogists around Ireland and the disapora have been hoping that secret caches of 19th century census material would come to light. Initially, they said “don’t be ridiculous” but slowly, the tune started to change. At present, the Virtual Treasury has recovered over 157,000 names from these…
The latest edition of Fingal Studies is now out. This is the offical journal of Fingal Local Studies and Archives, published annually. The launch will take place on Saturday as part of the Fingal Festival of History, at which I’m also speaking. It’s my first time publishing an article in this journal and it’s a…
At this time of year, I often find myself in discussion about the relative merits and flaws for different genealogy websites. By chance today, I came across some negative reviews on Trust Pilot for one such site, and it struck me, reading the largely poor reviews, that most people were misunderstanding the whole point. Ireland…
School records are an under-used resource in genealogy, largely because they are so dispersed, with very few online. Some are in county archives, some are in the National Archives, some are still housed in the original school and I suspect a great many more are in random places like some old principal’s attic. I’ve begun…
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…
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…
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…