Category: Genealogy

St Patrick’s Day is a time when Irish people and those with Irish ancestry take pride in their heritage and celebrate together. One video from Faile Ireland released on St Patrick’s Day in 2014 really encapsulates the pride and passion people feel about their Irish heritage.

The last few years have seen a huge increase of people from all over the world logging on to the Irish Genealogy website to find new information about their family history. Ireland’s General Register Office released 27 million records of births, marriages and deaths all the way up to 2013. The birth index goes back… Continue reading Great resources are available for people searching for records of their Irish ancestors

While Christopher Columbus is credited with being the first European to discover America, there are many scholars who believe there may have already been Irish people living there. A book that was published in 1526, just 34 years after Columbus arrived in America, provides compelling evidence that this may be true. The book, De Orbe… Continue reading Did the Irish reach America before Columbus?

Former Friends star Lisa Kudrow joked with Conan O’Brien about the difficulty of tracing his Irish ancestry. The actress has produced the series Who Do You Think You Are? – which helps celebrities research their family history – since 2010. She joined O’Brien on his chat-show recently, and admitted that tracing Irish family history is… Continue reading Lisa Kudrow jokes about difficulty of tracing Irish ancestry

An author discovered that one of the most famous films in Irish history features an actor who took part in the Easter Rising. Dermot McEvoy is an expert on the Easter Rising and he reveals that the man who played the Reverend Mister Playfair in The Quiet Man was one of the rebels imprisoned in… Continue reading Quiet Man actor took part in 1916 Easter Rising

People researching their Irish ancestry received a welcome boost when the Catholic parish registers became available online. The registers are considered the single most important resource for researching Irish ancestry.

An Irish American politician called for ‘The Great Famine’ to be a part of the US curriculum. Millions of Irish people were forced to leave their homeland in the mid-1800s, as a series of failed potato crops left them starving and unable to survive. Millions more stayed and died in one of the biggest mass… Continue reading Great Famine ‘should be taught’ in California schools

People with Irish roots have a great opportunity to start searching their family history for free thanks to ancestry.ie who have made more than ten million records available online. The family tree website has published Catholic Parish Registers dating from 1655 all the way up to 1915.