Ireland XO round up - Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2016

Picture: Clare Doyle and Laura Colleran of Ireland Reaching out with Aiden Feerick from Ancestor Network

We had a very busy 3 days and had the chance to meet many of our members from the UK, USA, Canada and South Africa as well introducing our programme for the first time to other visitors to the show. As always, people were delighted to hear that they could connect directly with people in their ancestor’s community of origin through Ireland XO.

Most visitors came armed with heavy folders documenting their research so far and were overwhelmed at the prospect of connecting with people locally in Ireland who may have had a direct link to their ancestors.  After so many years of paper and digital research, this prospect was quite an emotional one for many people. Many that had began their research decades before. Knowing that they can now contact and engage with people in their ancestor's community through Ireland XO re-ignited their hopes to discover more about their ancestry.

During the event, what came across strongly is the massive year-on-year development in worldwide genealogical research, which is helping people from all walks of life access information about their family’s history. The rate of growth and innovation in this sector has taken on such a pace that what may have been “unfindable” a year ago, may well be just a few clicks away today.

There was a real focus on using cutting edge science to further understanding of family history, with Aideen Feerick, Director of the Ancestor Network commenting,

"When the paper trail runs out, DNA testing offers families another way of finding out if they share a common ancestor or if other families they never considered part of their heritage could be linked to them."

Speaking about smarter search technologies Aiden said,

"More and more records have been (and are being) digitised. Perhaps what we need now are more sophisticated search technologies. These newer and smarter search programs will enable us to interrogate the records using different fields, like occupation, address, birthplace as well as keywords. The smarter programs could, for example, help us to identify all the children of a marriage found in Civil registration without having to search for each one separately. Some of these smarter search engines were available and on display at the WDYTYA exhibition. They deserve to be better known."

Irish family history interests were very well represented and at any time during the event there were queues of people looking to access the National Library of Ireland’s parish records, The Irish National Archives of Ireland Census records or to attend one the many Irish genealogy themed workshops. The line-up of experts on Irish family history included:

• Fiona Fitzsimons from Eneclann gave tips on finding Irish Ancestors.
• Grant Edward Curley spoke about researching Irish Catholic Births and marriages to 1880. In another session Grand spoke about Irish census and census substitutes that might lead you to your family in Ireland prior to 1864 civil registration.
• Brian Donavan from Eneclann explained how to untangle surviving records fro 1912 – 1923, which saw the deaths of more than 75,000 Irish men in armed conflict between the First World War and the Irish Revolution.
• Dr Maebh Harding highlighted the key issues affecting Irish marriages in the 19^th Century.
• Ed Gilbert, from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland presented the results of the Irish DNA Atlas Project which is a fascinating case study in population genetics.
• Dr Jim Ryan took a light-hearted look at some strange and unusual sources for Irish family history research from financial fraud to illicit distillers’ convictions.
• Cathy Swift, from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, spoke about Irish migration to Liverpool and surrounding regions in NW England.

If you live in the UK and did not have the opportunity to visit us at Who Do You Think You Are last week, please visit our message board and share your family history with us. We are here to help you in any way we can and our volunteers all over Ireland are eager to reconnect their community with the descendants of its people who left in the past.