Four Years Old And Going On Hiatus

Townland of Origin began just over four years ago. The mission statement of the blog has always been to highlight interesting records and resources that can help a genealogist find their ancestor's place of origin in Ireland. Since 2013, there has been over 226,000 page views and almost 300 blog posts covering 42 American states, 32 Irish counties and 10 Canadian provinces. 

However, the time has come to go on hiatus, at least for the rest of this year, but likely for longer.

The best way to access the considerable amount of information on this website is via the Archive. Select your state, province or county of interest and proceed from there.

I'll still be active on twitter and will post new, old and interesting genealogy information that I come across.

Thanks to all to all those who have followed, read, and retweeted the posts. 

Regards,

Joe Buggy

I'm Speaking At The Genealogy Event

The Genealogy Event takes place in Adare, County Limerick, from Thursday, 31 August to Saturday 2 September. There is a great lineup of speakers with topics such as DNA, military research, church records and newspaper just a sample of what will be available to attendees. I am presenting two talks on the Saturday - Researching Uncle Sam: Genealogy Resources in the USA and Finding Your Irish Ancestors in New York City.

Full details

• Website: The Genealogy Event
• Venue: Woodlands House Hotel, Adare, County Limerick
• Tickets
• Conference schedule and topics (pdf) including -
• Researching Uncle Sam: Genealogy Resources in the USA, 11:20am-12pm, Saturday, 2 September
• Finding Your Irish Ancestors in New York City, 1:50pm-2:30pm Saturday, 2 September

Beara Peninsula Genealogy

Riobard O'Dwyer has studied the genealogy, history and social customs of the families on the Beara Peninsula, Counties Cork and Kerry, for more than 40 years. Many people from this area emigrated to the United States and Canada over the last 200+ years. In 2009, he published three volumes of The Annals of Beara. The work contains information on families from the Roman Catholic parishes of Adrigole,  Allihies (both in Volume 1), Bere Island, Eyeries (both in Volume 2), Castletownbere and Glengarriff (both in Volume 3).[1] Volume 3 also contains a brief history of the O'Sullivan clan.[2]

Roman Catholic Parishes Beara Peninsula. Courtesy National Library of Ireland[3] 

The foreword to volume one outlines that he consulted every church record in the area. This was combined with local knowledge of who married whom, what occupation they had and where they lived locally or emigrated to.[4] The combination of these aspects allowed the author to tie many North American immigrants to what townland there were originally from on the peninsula.

The volumes were digitized earlier this year by the New England Historic Genealogical Society and are available on their website, americanancestors.org. Currently, only volume one has been indexed, while volumes two and three are browse only. A table of contents for all three volumes is available here (pdf).

---

[1] Rregisters.nli.ie notes that Castletownbere and Bere Island are the same Roman Catholic parish.

[2] Description. Beara, Ireland: The Annals of Beara. 2016. Available online at https://www.americanancestors.org/databases/ireland-the-annals-of-beara/about/?rId=0&filterQuery=page:5http://www.americanancestors.org/databases/annals-of-beara/about: accessed 30 July 2017.

[4] Search the map, Roman Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland. http://registers.nli.ie: accessed 30 July 2017.

[4] O'Dwyer, Riobard. The Annals of Bears: Volume I Adrigole and Alihies Parishes. Statesboro, Georgia : Gold Stag Publications. 2009. p. i.