Irish Citizenship by Descent
Many people ask us at ProGenealogists about obtaining Irish citizenship through their ancestors. Ireland’s laws on this subject are more liberal than most other European countries. If one of your grandparents was born on the island of Ireland (including in present-day Northern Ireland), you can obtain citizenship in the Republic of Ireland by documenting your grandparent and your descent from him or her. A set of specific documents is needed, and we help many people with this process. Our firm can help you to gather all of the documents necessary for your application to be successful.
Every year, Irish embassies and consulates consider some 10,000-15,000 applications for Irish citizenship through what is called the “Foreign Births Register.” When you obtain Irish citizenship through a grandparent born in Ireland, the formal process includes registering your birth in Ireland’s “Foreign Births Register.”
Your application for Irish citizenship through a grandparent may take a year or more time to process. Thus, we recommend that you make your application as complete and correct as possible before submitting it. You will need to submit original documentation to clearly establish your own identity and your relation to your parent and your Irish-born grandparent. You can read about the specific document requirements on our Irish Citizenship page.
“Who Do You Think You Are?” Episode Summaries
It is so exciting for us to see genealogy come to life on network TV in the new NBC series “Who Do You Think You Are?“ I hope you are enjoying every minute of the journey upon which each of the celebrities embarks. One of the best aspects of having conducted research on each of the episodes, besides the fact that each story is unique and compelling and gives our research chops a “work-out,” is that we have the opportunity, thanks to Ancestry.com and Wall-to-Wall Productions, to work with researchers across the globe. I am so passionate about this television series. I get to see historical research come to life on screen. I get to see the impact of history face-to-face!
Guess what? You may not think so right now, but you have stories like the celebrities’ stories in your own family tree! Just make sure you’re looking for them. Genealogy and family history represent far more than just names on a pedigree chart. Take time to learn about the era in which your ancestors lived; in fact, doing that might just help you solve the next generation!
At ProGenealogists, we have helped clients, who thought they were alone in the world, find half-siblings, aunts and uncles that they didn’t know they had. They had lost touch with their families for various reasons … cycles of divorce, abandonment, or other traumatic events. Getting them back in touch with living family members have helped clients heal and be touched by the stories presented to them. These types of family reunion stories are truly moving and they are stories that we’ll never forget. Genealogical and historical research can actively touch the lives of a person living today.
Some of our clients need us to help them break through some difficult problem that they have been working on for years. Many times, they don’t believe that we can actually help them, but given time we can often make significant headway if not actually solve the mystery. Again, we end up touching the lives of someone living today with history! How great is that? Some of the greatest joy that we professional genealogists can have is a very happy client on the phone relating how they didn’t think we could do it, but we did, and now they are thrilled!
An earlier blog entry mentioned that we’d be putting up pages from each of the episodes and highlighting some of the sources used. I’m pleased to announce that those pages are being posted regularly, in the hours following the TV show. You’ll find them under “Case Studies” on our website, or, just click the “Who Do You Think You Are?” blue banner on the homepage. The different episodes will be listed on the right side of the page.
Hope you are enjoying the show!
“Who Do You Think You Are?” is scheduled every Friday on NBC at 8/7c. This Friday viewers will witness Lisa Kudrow’s amazing journey into her ancestry.
Be Smarter than the Search Engine
It is wonderful that there are so many genealogical databases on the Internet! Each database has different content. Therefore, the information in each is also accessed differently depending on what the search engine allows. I have learned that it is important not to give up on your search, and I’ve learned that I can be smarter than the search engine.
Sherry Lindsay recently wrote about performing wildcard searches on Ancestry.com. The following is a case study in using search engines that focuses on using the search engine on GenealogyBank.com.
Wildcards can be used to search GenealogyBank.com, the largest newspaper archive. However, using wildcards may not always be the best way to access the record you need. Recently I was frustrated with some of the limitations of GenealogyBank.com’s search engine. Then a colleague guided me in other ways to search this database that were very effective.
I was looking for an obituary referenced in the Louisiana Biography and Obituary Index. GenealogyBank’s database did include the issue of the newspaper I needed, but the name fields (even using wildcards) did not lead me to the article I was seeking. I found obituaries listed only pages away from the one I was looking for. That was when I found limitation number 1.
Limitation 1: When looking at a specific image of a newspaper, the user cannot navigate to images of other pages within that issue – or any other image.
Suggestion 1: Limit your search by entering the exact date of the issue (in the date search field) and make sure you’ve already clicked the box for the state where the newspaper was published.
Having limited the search to the state and exact date of the issue I needed helped significantly. However, I still needed to figure out how to access the right page of the issue.
Limitation 2: The content on the database was indexed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Therefore, wherever the type on the article was faint, the OCR technology did not recognize the words, thereby, excluding the faint words from the searchable text.
This was the case with the obituary I was looking for. The name of the decedent was faint.
Suggestion 2: Use the keyword search fields to limit your search keeping in mind some of the words in the article might not have been picked up by the OCR technology. When looking for an obituary your keywords might include: other names mentioned in the article; the words died, dead, death, obituary or notice; and the day of the week the event took place. These keywords could help lead you to the page containing the obituaries.
Final Suggestion: Most databases include search tips that can be very helpful. GenealogyBank has a link to search tips right below the middle initial field titled “learn more.”
Witches in Your Family Tree
Ancestral witches were one of the key stories spotlighted in last week’s episode of “Who Do You Think You Are” on NBC. The series, which follows celebrities as they explore their family tree, included a story about an ancestress who had been accused of being a witch! Of course, many genealogists are aware of the witchcraft hysteria of early New England, but are stunned to find an ancestor involved in this episode of the country’s history. Well, as part of the research team that worked with Ancestry.com to trace the ancestry, here is “the rest of the story.”
It’s not that uncommon to find an accused witch among an extensive New England ancestry. Over 310 men and women were accused of witchcraft during the 1600s in the British colonies, and they were not all in Salem or in 1692. While Massachusetts was by far the leader (as if that’s something to brag about), witches were accused as far south as Virginia, and in most of the other colonies as well. In fact, eventually, about 43 of them were found guilty and died as a witch, most being executed, but some died in the squalor of the prison.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to research the accused witches and found much confusion among the various lists in print and on the web. That led to an effort to make an accurate list, based on credible sources, so that all genealogists could readily identify possible witches in their family tree. That article, Witches in Colonial America, is now online with as full a list as possible. It includes the name of the accused witch, birth and death dates (as far as known), the location, the date and the outcome of the accusation. Of course, one of the nice things about having a witch in the family tree is that more information may be available about him or her. So, stop by the list and see how many of your ancestors you can find! And, if you find a credible witch that’s not on our list, send me a note so we can add him or her.
There are also more than 50 names of persons who appear on such witch lists in error; they were never actually accused or are mistakes in older lists. It’s a good place to double check when a name comes up as a witch.
And, don’t forget to tune into NBC for the next episode of the fascinating new series!
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