Family tree prog

[JimmieSParticipant @jimmies]

Hi Nicholas and any other folk researching Irish families, this site is free to access and download, but is probably somewhat limited in content. Also see my previous post re historical destruction of many records.

Jim

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/civil-search.jsp

 

 

 

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Jim, I only had that one reason for Ireland, as I think her father was working there for some time, and got married there, and some time later he and his family move back to England, where all her siblings were born, but thanks for the link, which I’ve saved in my favourites.

Regards Nick.

[JimmieS]

On JimmieS Said:

… Am I being too cynical in wondering how much of this misrepresentation has been generated by a few ‘professional genealogists’?

Jim

Probably!  Although slapdash professionals are always a risk, most of the damage is done by enthusiastic amateurs.  Most family trees  come from them, no training, and inclined to jump to conclusions, especially at first.   Even experienced researchers can be misled, so everything has to be checked.   Don’t trust other people’s work!

My family have lots of relatively unusual surnames, no John Smiths, which helps enormously.  Even so I was caught out by an unusual to modern eyes female name which turned out to have been common as muck for about 5 years during the 19th Century.

I’ve also got a branch of the tree named “Foley-Davey”, which I thought would be easy to unpick.  Unfortunately this group of my ancestors chopped and changed surname during their lifetimes.  Apparently randomly, no idea why!  Multiple combinations or Folly, Foley, Foly, Folley, Davey and  Davy, single or hyphenated, mostly “Foley-Davey”, but also “Davey-Foley”.    Two sisters shared a home for their entire lives, one either Foley or Foly, the other was always “Foley-Davey”.   Turns Foley-Davey isn’t an unusual surname, and most of them aren’t relations at all…

Dave

 

[Mike HurleyParticipant @mikehurley60381]

David & Nicholas – many thanks for the feedback. All useful to know

regards Mike

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I agree with Dave (SOD), about checking everything, and not trusting everything you see, especially if they are not backed up with any citations, and the more of them there are, and the more checking in other ways, the more likely the information is true. I’ve seen many trees that put details about one of my ancestors, whose name I only know by a son of his, via his sons second marriage after his first wife’s death, and I’ve only recently found out her name and where they were married, but nothing more. There is also many trees with the same information, but those that have additional info, have no citations or evidence of there info. My ancestor in question, just has a Christian name and a Surname, but there were quite a lot of men around the country in the same period of time, with exactly the same two names. and myself and other trees have not found any of them that can be connected to our own tree. There was no national department back then to register births, marriages and deaths, and they were mostly done in church records, and of course, were at risk of being lost or even destroyed one way of another, and maybe not even been made public. My mothers fathers first WW army records, along with many others, got destroyed by a fire in the place where they were kept, and so there is only limited info there to be found.

Regards Nick.

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