CLARE CHATTER : BEHIND THE NEWS

RESTORATION OF CIVIL RECORDS

Recently I posted about the restoration of some records to www.irishgenealogy.ie  .....

This is the story behind the story... 

from The Irish Times, April 8, 2015

IRISH ROOTS: EVENTS EVERYWHERE - HERITAGE NEWS | THE IRISH TIMES - MON, APR 29, 2013

Irish Roots: events everywhere

The very late spring has produced explosions of green

The very late spring has produced explosions of green everywhere. And the events season – conferences, meetings, commemorations – has also arrived with a bang.
Among the most recent additions to the calendar is the National Famine Commemoration. First held only four years ago, it is staged on a Sunday in May in each province in rotation – this year's is to be held in Kilrush on May 12th next. The event is not just a single ceremony, however. For a full 10 days starting from May 3rd, an extraordinary series of talks, concerts, films, guided walks and re-enactments bears witness to the devastating impact of the Famine in south-west Clare. Details are at faminecommemoration2013.ie. One of the organisers, Paddy Waldron, has put together an excellent online guide to relevant genealogical and local history records at tinyurl.com/c55yt9z.
Another recently-born, equally remarkable event is the Fifth Summer Conference of the Sligo Field Club, "A Celebration of Sligo Families", being held in Sligo on from May 10th to 12th. What's so remarkable? The line-up of speakers positively glows: Jim Mallory, Ken Nicholls, Nollaig Ó Muraíle, Gerard Moran, Tom Bartlett, Catríona Crowe . . . Awaiting you is a weekend of rare (and witty) talk on Sligo families, particularly from the 17th century. See facebook.com/ TheSligoFieldClub.
If neither of these suit you, take a meander through The Gathering website, thegatheringireland.com. For next weekend alone, it lists more than 100 events. The variety is bewildering, ranging from the Dún Laoghaire festival of flags and emblems through the Maguire history weekend in Enniskillen to the Lorteo class of 1978 reunion in Mullingar.
If you extend your range to a month, the number of events grows into thousands and the diversity gets positively surreal: The Ballinacoola Murphy Clan, PJ's 70th Birthday Bash and, my favourite, "Come Back Morgan" self-described as " one big fat excuse for you to come back to visit us this Summer!" Front up, Morgan.
We may be broke, but at least we're not staying at home brooding about it.

irishtimes.com/ancestor
irishroots@irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com/blogs/irishroots

KILRUSH FAMINE COMMEMORATION, KILRUSH MAY 3RD TO 12TH 2013

KILRUSH FAMINE COMMEMORATION, KILRUSH MAY 3RD TO 12TH 2013

On Friday the National Famine Commemoration Event will get off to an official start in Carrigaholt at 6 pm with a performance and oral history on famine times followed by a lecture in Carrigaholt Parish Hall by Tom Power on the Role Australia played in the Irish Famine.

A whole week of events followed all across the former Kilrush Poor Law Union leading up to the official ceremony which President Michael D Higgins will preside over.

This very special event is covered in both articles in the Irish Times today.

I am also attaching an invitation on behalf of the Old Kilfarboy Society, where you are cordially invited to the launch of The Mass Evictions in Kilrush Poor Law Union During the Great Famine by Matt Lynch which will take place at 8pm, on Tuesday, 7 May at An Teach Ceoil, Kilrush.  

It promises to be a brilliant week and I know of CRS members worldwide who are getting ready to travel over to this fantastic event.

Safe travels.

Clara Hoyne

Clare Roots Secretary

John Grenham : GENEALOGY BRINGS TOURISM... irishgenealogy.ie

John Grenham, in The Irish Times, applauds the revamping of

irishgenealogy.ie

JOHN GRENHAM.." Genealogy! Irish-America! Mega-bucks!"

Have to agree with Clara...

"Yes definitely, John Grenham brightens up a dull day!"

Clara Hoyne

Clare Roots Society Secretary

Please click on image to enlarge...

" GENEALOGY SECTOR MUST UNWIND ITS HISTORICALLY TWISTED ROOTS "

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0924/1224324323188.html

The Irish Times - Monday, September 24, 2012

BUSINESS OPINION: A SEEMINGLY logical move by the National Library to look for a partner to digitise its collections may well lift the lid on the mess that is the Irish "roots" business.
On the face of it, the National Library is not up to anything particularly subversive. Like every other State institution, it is strapped for cash and having to think of creative ways to fulfil its mandate.
But the decision to try and capitalise on the wealth of genealogical data in its archives is likely to kick over a hornets' nest of vested interests and public service fiefdoms that have combined to prevent any co-ordinated exploitation of the State genealogical records to drive tourism and revenue.
A case in point is The Gathering 2013, one of the Government's "big ideas" to boost tourism. According to its own website, "Over 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry. The Gathering Ireland 2013 provides the perfect excuse to reach out to those who have moved away, their relatives, friends and descendants, and invite them home." You would expect such big enterprise to be supported by a slick online genealogical platform, But go to the "Tracing your roots" link at the bottom of the page and you are provided with links to no fewer than eight disparate bodies – including the National Library – that are in the roots game to some extent or the other. By moving to digitise its collections – including the all-important parish records – it is clearly moving to become primus inter pares in this muddle through bringing in a top-notch partner.
Any organisation seriously considering a joint venture with the National Library will zone in on the genealogical records. The early favourite, Scottish group Brightsolid, is first and foremost a genealogy business.
The hope is that the National Library will be able to get it – or whoever else chooses – to digitise the rest of its collection. This is equally important in the national context but far less commercially valuable. But it can expect a pretty rough ride.
The record books of the Irish churches are the mother lode for Irish genealogy research as they are the only reliable records of births, deaths and marriages in the period up to the Civil War, when the national archive was destroyed. They are in theory the property of the various bishops – Catholic and Church of Ireland – but the National Library has microfiche copies, which it owns and which will no doubt form the heart of any deal it does with a third party. Then there is the Irish Family History Foundation, which operates a commercial site ( RootsIreland.ie) and is led by Fianna Fáil Senator and putative presidential candidate Labhrás Ó Murchú. It has its own version of the parish records database – copied by hand from the National Library microfiche apparently.
A somewhat opaque organisation, it is described on its website as "a company limited by guarantee with no share capital and no distribution of profits. As such it is a voluntary organisation made up of local genealogy centres, the majority of which are legally established on the same basis. It is governed by its articles and memorandum of association, which set out how it operates and limits its membership to 35 local centres with specified catchment areas."
The beneficiaries of its activities would appear then to be the promoters of the various local genealogy centres, many of which are subvented by county councils and other State bodies. They are certainly a powerful bunch as they appear to have been able to stymy any efforts by the Government to control the exploitation of this State asset.
The Government's main investment in this area is IrishGenealogy.ie, run by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. However, it gets only equal billing with RootsIreland.ieon The Gathering website. The reason being presumably because it only offers access to the Catholic parish records of Cork and Ross, Dublin and Kerry. (It also has the Church of Ireland records for Dublin, Carlow and Kerry.) RootsIreland seems to have the rest.
The National Library's decision to get into the "roots" game raises the prospect of real competition for the Irish Family History Foundation. It also creates a situation where one arm of the State ( IrishGenealogy.ie) will be competing (albeit half-heartedly) with another (the National Library), while both compete with the peculiar beast that is the Irish Family History Foundation.
It is a mess and needs to be sorted out for a number of reasons, the first being that if the Government thinks it is good idea to commercialise the National Library collection in order to preserve it digitally, then it had better ensure that any potential partner is encouraged.
The second reason is that if the Government is serious about using genealogy to drive tourism, then it had better get serious about genealogy.

EIGHTEENTH & NINETEENTH CENTURY CENSUS SUBSTITUTES

We often decry the lack or remaining or available Census data for Ireland,

but there are a number of Census substitutes, other than Griffith's Valuations,

which most of us know and use. One of the best lists I have seen is at

http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/browse/records/census/eight.htm

This is just a lead in... for full details please go to the link above...

another great asset provided by The Irish Times.

Eighteenth & Nineteenth Century Census Substitutes

The Convert Rolls Protestant Householders Elphin Diocesan Census The Religious Survey of 1766 Dissenters' petitions, 1775 Offical Papers & petitions Charleton Trust Fund Spinning Wheel Premium Lists Persons who suffered losses in 1798

1803 Agricultural census Tithe Applotment Books Reproductive Loan Fund Records National School Records Workhouse records Griffiths Valuation Landowners in Ireland Lists of Freeholders Voters Lists and Poll Books Electoral Records

1703-1838: The Convert Rolls

Eileen O Byrne, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1981. A list of those converting from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland. The bulk of the entries date from 1760 to 1790.

1740: Protestant householders

This applies to parts of Counties Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal and Tyrone. Arranged by barony and parish, it gives names only. Parts are at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, The Genealogical Office, the National Library of Ireland and the Representative Church Body Library.

Much more available at the link above.

Courtesy of Clara Hoyne, Clare Roots Society Secretary,

who 'flagged' this article...

Discover your genetic ancestors

A detail from Desmond Kinney's 1974 Táin Wall off Nassau Street in Dublin depicting Cúchulainn and Ferdia in single combat. New DNA technology means Irish people can trace their ancestry and while they obviously cannot trace a lineage to legendary heroes, the process can identify links to ancient royal Irish families.Photograph: Richard Marsh

DICK AHLSTROM

WHOSE BLOOD courses through your veins? Could you be a descendant of a Viking warrior or a Berber pirate? Or perhaps you are related to the Uí Neill chieftains or the kings of Laighin (Leinster)?

If so your genes will carry the proof, and a new company set up by scientists offers a service that can reveal your genetic heritage.

Today sees the launch of "Ireland's DNA", a direct to customer genetic ancestry service. "We are planning it as a national project. The more people that get involved, the more we can understand about Irish history from the resulting dataset," says Dr Gianpiero Cavalleri, one of three founders of the company.

Cavalleri is a biomedical research lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and heads its epilepsy genetics group. The Irish project grew out of a similar undertaking that started about six months ago in Scotland.

And that in turn came out of a book examining the genetic ancestry of Scotland, The Scots: A Genetic Journey. The authors were Dr James Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh who works on the genetic roots of disease, and historian Alistair Moffat.

"There was huge public interest in the book," Dr Cavalleri says, so much so that the three decided to set up a company, Scotland's DNA, to help finance further study of the country's collective genome.

"Now we are going to use the same concept for Ireland," he says. He got the idea some years ago while at Stanford University. He became fascinated with the idea that you could identify past human migration by looking at the male-only part of the genome, the Y chromosome.

As males of a given lineage began their migration out of Africa, some would have been more successful than others. Untold numbers would have been killed off, but many continued to branch out into Europe and Asia. Successful migrants would have left their mark behind in the Y chromosome.

He realised that people were interested to know their links to past generations. "With DNA you can really go deep into the past to learn where your ancestors came from," he says.

A decade ago it was tremendously expensive to deliver a complete genome but today prices have fallen and it is feasible to think of using DNA technology to identify ancestry. About 20,000 genomes have been completed so far by labs around the world and this has opened up the possibility of direct Y chromosome comparisons between individuals and groups.

The more genomes completed, the more the resolution improves, and the better the ability to see back in time. "Up until recently we might have had a genetic signature for the northwest of Ireland collectively as being Irish. What has happened since is we can split up the Irish type. The higher resolution comes from the sequencing of the human genome."

It all comes down to comparisons. "We look for markers and see what they are telling us," he says. "A marker is part of the DNA that is different between people. Those differences arise with each generation."

Most of our genome is a mix of our mother's and father's DNA, but the Y chromosome does not mix in a substantial way. Cavalleri likens it to the Olympic torch as individual runners carry it from city to city on the way to the games.

The same torch is passed from person to person but imagine that each person is able to leave behind a mark on the torch, a small spelling change in the DNA. "By looking at those spelling changes you get a sense of how those people have moved. After all, we are part of one big pedigree." It is all about knowing what markers are hidden in a genome pointing towards one ancestry or another.

You can read the full article here...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2012/0503/1224315503586.html?via=mr

CLARE ROOTS SOCIETY

CLARE CHATTER

Some recommended TV viewing from John Grenham.

Courtesy of

Clara Hoyne

Clare Roots Society Secretary

Please click on image to enlarge.

THE CHIEF SECRETARY’S OFFICE REGISTERED PAPERS ONLINE

February 20, 2012 @ 11:23 am | by JOHN GRENHAM

"CSORP" looks like the name of an Eastern European secret police force. In fact, it is the acronym for one of the most under-appreciated Irish historical sources, the Chief Secretary's Office Registered Papers. The Chief Secretary, based in Dublin Castle, became the effective head of government in Ireland in the decades after the Act of Union in 1800. The registered papers are the records of all incoming correspondence to his Office, and cover the years 1818 to 1924. They comprise an extraordinary collection of documents: complaints, petitions, memoranda, accounts and reports on virtually every aspect of the administration of Ireland. And they have survived intact in the National Archives.

Until now, the only access routes to their contents have been via a partial card index in the Reading Room and the original annual CSO registers. The only widely known records were the many local petitions addressed to the Office, any one of which can list hundreds of names. Now a new website, csorp.nationalarchives.ie, aims to catalogue and calendar every single document in the collection between 1818 and 1852. For the moment only the first five years, 1818 to 1822, are complete, but already the vivid weirdness of 19th century Ireland is springing to life. One example: in 1821, a Dublin merchant, George Ness, proposed allowing the admission of Catholics to the Freedom of the City. As a result, he received an anonymous letter, which he forwarded to the Chief Secretary's Office. The letter threatens that, '…if I hear another word out of your head about Papists to be made freemen of any our corporations I will have you dragged from limb to limb and your head hung on the rapper of your halldoor..'. The letter is signed 'a fellow that wd shoot a papist, as soon sir as you wd a mad dog'.

Living history, indeed.

PARDON ON WAY FOR IRISH WHO FOUGHT, SAYS SHATTER

Courtesy of Clara Hoyne....

The Irish Times - Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Paddy and Freddie Reid, who deserted from the Irish Army, were among the almost 5,000 people who joined the Allied armies

STEPHEN COLLINS, Political Editor
A PARDON for thousands of Irish soldiers who deserted from the Defence Forces to fight for the Allies in the second World War is on the way, Minister for Defence Alan Shatter has indicated.
While the Minister awaits formal advice from Attorney General Máire Whelan about how to proceed, he has said he regards the dishonourable discharge of soldiers who left to fight for the Allies as untenable.
Mr Shatter noted that for more than a decade the Irishmen who died fighting for Britain in the second World War had been commemorated in their own country.
"Many who fought in British uniforms during that war returned to Ireland. For too many years, their contribution in preserving European and Irish democracy was ignored.
"Some of those include members of our Defence Forces who left this island during that time to fight for freedom and who were subsequently dishonourably discharged from the Defence Forces," said the Minister.
He said it was now appropriate to revisit the manner in which they were treated while also remembering that those who served in the Defence Forces throughout that time performed a crucial national duty.
"It is untenable that we commemorate those who died whilst continuing to ignore the manner in which our State treated the living, in the period immediately after World War II, who returned to our State having fought for freedom and democracy," said Mr Shatter.
During that war 4,983 people deserted from the Defence Forces to join the Allied armies. Those who returned to Ireland were refused military pensions and were debarred from a range of State employment on the basis of an Emergency Powers Order passed by the Dáil in 1945.
On Monday the Northern Ireland Assembly unanimously backed the campaign for pardons for the servicemen involved.

For the full story, please follow the link below...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/0125/1224310710060.html#

A HISTORY OF IRELAND IN 100 OBJECTS - THE IRISH TIMES - SAT, JAN 14, 2012

We are so fortunate to live in an age where we can share the history and culture of other lands by the click of a button.... Read more about the wonderful and intriguing history of Ireland in the article that follows...

FINTAN O'TOOLE
The Domhnach Airgid, circa 1350

The Domhnach Airgid – or Silver Church – is a splendid exercise in medieval retro. It is not just an antique; it is a very deliberate display of self-conscious antiquity.
One of the reasons the Anglo-Normans provided a far more potent threat to the established order in Ireland than the Vikings had ever done is that these newcomers were enormously interested in controlling the Irish church.
The reform of a supposedly decadent Irish Christianity was the key ideological justification for the Anglo-Norman invasions. This also justified the supplanting of native by foreign abbots and bishops.
Long before the coming of the Anglo-Normans, however, the Irish church was in touch with the reforming movements of European Christianity, including those in England. This was especially true of the Hiberno-Norse towns of Waterford and Dublin, whose bishop Giolla Pátraic was consecrated in 1073 by the archbishop of Westminster, whom he recognised as "primate of the Britains".
The reorganisation of the Irish church into territorial dioceses on the continental model was likewise completed before the Anglo-Norman invasion. 


For the full story, go to the link below...


http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0114/1224310228113.html




Where to see it National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, 01-6777444, museum.ie