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 [...]

If you have ancestors that lived in Stockholm and haven’t yet visited Stockholms Stadsarkiv you should take a look at the resources available there. Depending on the time period in which you are interested, you may just find the answers to some of your research questions on this site. In addition to offering indexes and [...]

During college football season this year, I got to see the following commercial quite a lot.

And I always thought after it was over that the father and son should have hired us before embarking on a European journey to discover their ancestral lands.

There are many excellent resources out there for the genealogists studying their English heritage. We all know about sites such as Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.com and the the like. However, the English county record offices and other county-level governmental bodies are slowly but surely digitizing a great deal of old records. It is interesting that many of [...]

With the holiday season in full-swing, I thought it would be fun to use various holiday words and phrases and see if I could find people in historical records that carried these words and phrases as actual names. Here are a few that I found:
1. Mary Christmas
There are many instances of this name appearing, but [...]

I was researching a South African family the other day who did some traveling back and forth between South Africa and England. While examining a 1912 passenger arrival manifest at Southampton, UK, I noted a gentleman listed on the same manifest as the ancestral family whose occupation caught my attention. Check it out:
In case you [...]

The other day I was researching in the parish registers of St. Cuthbert’s, an Anglican church in Darlington, County Durham, England. As I was studying these registers, I came across a curious baptismal entry that was recorded in the early eighteenth century. Which of the entries do you think it is?
Look at the entry that reads “A [...]

There is exciting news from the principal repository of records in Northern Ireland; that is, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in the city of Belfast. First, the PRONI (as it is often called) is getting a new home in 2011. The move will mean that is present Balmoral Avenue site will be [...]

I had the pleasure this month of visiting the Archives de Paris, the public archives of the city of Paris. It is located on boulevard Sérurier near the Porte des Lilas metro station. That metro station is on metro lines 11 and 3bis.
During my visit, I was impressed by the records available at the Archives [...]

Studying our ancestors often throws up surprises. Many of us begin the study of our genealogy with a few stories (usually of the fantastic variety) and perhaps we initially feel a little let down when we reality dawns. However, I feel that reality is often so much more interesting.
A case in point is a family [...]