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…
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…
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…
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…
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…