Starting out with Irish Family History

Ancestors from Ireland?

Always wondered how to find out more?

Join us to learn how to get started researching your Irish family history.

December 9^th at 1pm

Many people are put off researching their Irish ancestors as they have heard tales of “all the records going up in smoke” or been told that “it is too difficult”.  Yes, we lost a major tranche of records at the start of the Irish civil war in 1922 with the fire in the Four Courts in Dublin however a wealth of other records were never in that building and so are available to this day. Twenty years ago starting out with Irish research meant one needed to go to Ireland to consult the records.  Since then a great tranche of Irish records have been placed online and the Irish government has provided many of these on free websites.

So now is a great time to start researching Irish family history.  Join us to learn what records were lost, what records are available for free and how to get started with your research. No prior learning required.

About the Speaker:

Jill Williams was born and brought up in Cork in the Irish Republic.  A University College Cork graduate, she is a qualified teacher and has been teaching courses in Family History for over 20 years. For 15 years she volunteered regularly in the library of the Irish Genealogical Research Society (www.IrishAncestors.ie)  in London and in 2013 was honoured with a Fellowship of the Society.  She maintains the society’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/IrishGenealogicalResearchSociety, which currently has over 33000 followers.

She has given Irish genealogy talks and run workshops in various venues in Ireland, England & Scotland and more recently online.

Jill moved to Edinburgh 7 years ago and is a volunteer searcher for Birthlink, the Scottish adoption charity and pre Covid did a regular stint in the Scottish Genealogy Society library answering queries on Irish Genealogy.  She has a particular interest in websites to use for Irish family history and has written on the subject for a number of publications.