Researching records provides an alternative or complement to DNA tracing via Ancestry DNA, Family Tree DNA, and specifically our own Treinfhir Y-DNA Initiative. Each approach provides clues to understanding the results of the other, although the Y-DNA results will provide information that precedes almost all written records.
Links and ideas have appeared on our Facebook page, giving the interested member a few options for finding ancestors within the vast databases in Ireland and elsewhere. The table below compiles the posts, which are otherwise difficult to find on the Facebook Group page. Several additional links are also given. Links are in first column. If you wish to keep this page active, open link in separate tab. The Search box finds text within the table only.
In addition to the databases, some of the articles and write-ups below provide good background information that may be of interest. Additionally, if you hit a wall (a common expression for ancestry research), you may find it useful to post a question to our forum, under the ancestry by research topic. The forum is a very useful tool because interested members can “follow” a topic and receive email notifications of postings and replies.
Please note that some of the links provide further links, some of which are also below, and that some of the search engines use some of the same databases. For someone beginning research, an important goal is to avoid running in circles. The guidance provided by the first two links should help, along with carefully noting the databases and other sources as they are used.
Two entries, Volumes 1 and 2 of the classic text “Irish Pedigrees” by John O’Hart, have been scanned as images and made available by Google. We have converted them to searchable text using an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition). As OCR programs go, this one was very effective, adjusting for pages that were scanned at an angle and accepting an abundance of diacritics. The old-English script letter “s” is interpreted as an “f,” however. Being able to search the document is a great advantage, since they are about 2000 pages together. They are very large files; selecting the links may require you to download the files, rather than working with the preview. You can then open them with Adobe Acrobat, for example. We have also converted “The History of the County of Monaghan” to searchable text, with the file size pre-viewable but also downloadable.
You can also consider collecting the information on our Webtrees . This software will help us organize our trees, but does not perform searches that a paid service provides. Finally, we are collecting family trees and autosomal DNA within our GEDmatch effort, which provides additional ways to find links and join family trees.
The database list is being restricted to logged-in members due to several applying to the Treinfhir clan alone. Please take a moment to log in or to register if you are related to the Treinfhir clan. Upon returning to this page you may have to refresh the page. Thank you. Finally, we have a book that describes the ancestry of one of our clan, whose ancestors immigrated to Canada