Finding Your Irish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide

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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 929.10720415 EAN: 9781593312930 Format: Illustrated ISBN: 1593312938 Label: Ancestry Publishing Manufacturer: Ancestry Publishing Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 180 Publication Date: 2005-09-01 Publisher: Ancestry Publishing Studio: Ancestry Publishing
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Editorial Reviews: Finding Your Irish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide is the ultimate resource to help you learn if the luck of the Irish is in your blood or not. This easy-to-use guide will teach you to make use of the many Irish family history records that have become available in recent years. Explore the best family history sources in Ireland, including birth, marriage, and death records; church records; census records; and much more. Finding Your Irish Ancestors will help you discover Internet sites for searching Irish heritge and prepare for a successful family history trip to Ireland.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: For learning how to do Irish genealogy you can do better Comment: Finding Your Irish Ancestors: A Beginner's Guide by David S. Ouimette is Ancestry's Irish entry in its collection of family history titles. My initial thoughts on learning of the book's release were positive. For the avocation, more is better. Another book on Irish genealogy spreads the word further. It has the potential of bringing new people into the field. On a personal level there might be some new information that could advance my research. There are some things about this book that I love. The pictures of Ireland are grand. It's easy to see that the reproductions of records and sources were carefully chosen. And they are numerous. I really liked the "Extract from Census Return of 1851" an old age pension claim dating from 1915. The tables are informative and clear, especially "Irish Family History Sources" and "U.S. Census Information Helpful for Tracing Irish Immigrant Origins." Two case studies, one on using the Canceled Land Books and another on researching Royal Irish Constabulary records, were inspiring and a pleasure to read. On balance however there was more about the book that troubled than pleased me. The author uses more words than necessary. Here's an example: "Guilds often kept meticulous records of their membership, supplying the modern genealogist with family history details about early ancestors." The part of the quote I italicized appears in various forms in various places throughout the book. Ouimette too gingerly deals with the reality of Irish research that every genealogist faces: the dearth of typical records and why. While the example of President John F. Kennedy's rigorously and professionally researched tree that shows ancestry back to 1821 has elegance, the immensely significant loss of records at the Four Courts in 1922 is buried in a lengthy chronology. In an effort to be fair I read Ouimette's book through to the end and formed my opinions about it before pulling out and comparing it to A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Irish Ancestor's: How to find and record your unique heritage by Dwight A. Radford and Kyle J. Betit. The readability, comprehensiveness, attention to detail, and pragmatism of their book and their ability to satisfy readers from beginners to experts, are apparently unbeatable. They set researchers' expectations realistically on low and then provide mountains of information, explanation, sources, and tools. In contrast Ouimette's book seems superficial. More Reviews