Tracing family history at UL

A NOT-for-profit organisation providing independent information on Irish genealogy and ancestry, founded at the University of Limerick in 2011, is now extending its expertise beyond its campus base to communities in the Mid-West.
The Irish Ancestry Research Centre (IARC) provides a walk-in service for visitors and groups from all over the world to conduct personal research. It also offers workshops, certificate programmes and an online teaching service.
The University of Limerick has provided third-level qualifications and courses in History of Family since 2005 and since then has built significant expertise in the field.
IARC was founded in 2011 as a registered charity following a philanthropic donation from patrons John and Pauline Ryan. It launched a certificate course last year, giving participants the tools to trace their family roots and methodology to understand and research familial heritage in a local, regional and national context.
Among the lecturers on the course is East Clare woman Lorna Moloney, who explains, “The Irish Ancestry Research Centre is a leading provider of research, education and training in history of family and Irish ancestry. The centre also provides digitisation services for local and national repositories, with a particular focus on genealogical sources.”
As part of its remit, the centre also holds workshops that show participants how to use various research tools to trace family history. These workshops are now being rolled out to community groups and Lorna is currently working towards making them more accessible in Clare.
“It is very nice for a community to do this, as we don’t just look at the history of the individual, we might also look at the history of a village, as it provides the context. There is a great deal of interest in that. I’m given to mind a GAA book launched last year, where you couldn’t get in the door of John Minogue’s,” she says.
The workshops guide participants to sources, showing them what records are out there, how to get them and how to use them.
“We would like to keep it rural. We don’t want to compete with those people who are already doing works there. We are not trying to take over, we are trying to complement what is already there. For instance, Clare Local Studies have a superb archive for Clare people. They have records online too and have fabulous resources. It is an archive that forms part of our teaching material. I think there is a massive interest with our present diaspora and with the fact that we have massive interest in drawing people back into the country at the moment,” Lorna explains.
What makes Ireland different to others when it comes to genealogical research is the availability of records, Lorna says.
“We now have the 1901 Census available online in Ireland free. In other countries you pay for it and you don’t get as full a record as what we have. We also have the 1911 Census. We also teach people about all the different parts of the census, not just the front interface, the domain, parish, townland, everything and we break it down to make it user-friendly. The learning outcomes are built so people can go away and know what are the pitfalls in a census,” she says.
Among the types of pitfalls that can be encountered are those who lied about their age and others who put unusual relatives down on the forms.
“One man from West Clare put his dog down on the census. People will change their names and ages. They were very fond of lying about their ages, particularly between 1901 and 1911 because of the introduction of the 1909 old-age pension. Sometimes it is a significant jump in age, sometimes up to 20 years,” she says.
For those looking to research their own family history, Lorna advises they need to be aware there are skeletons in every family and they need to be prepared for this. However, the centre and their researchers treat these situations very sensitively.
“For instance, from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of it, five times more people were incarcerated in prisons and mental institutions than what had been in the beginning. The growth of institutions was part of the 19th century so people could be incarcerated for very minor reasons. So there is a sensitivity that’s needed,” she says.
Not only are there risks involved in the information gleaned from these records but there are also dangers in conducting the research, especially online.
“There are risks with digital research, particularly identity theft. If you are giving out information you need to be very careful, as all someone needs to take your identity is your date of birth and your mother’s maiden name. So we teach people how to safeguard the information and to use proper viral software,” she says.
The university-accredited certificate programme, which started last September, offers participants a chance to research their own family history and contextualise it on every level so they would be in a position to start out as genealogists. There are currently 13 participants in the course, ranging in age from early 30s to late 70s.
“It doesn’t leave anybody, no matter what age they are, without employability aspects because we are at that stage now where we have to be offering that service,” she explains.
Meanwhile, the masters course, which is reflected in the certificate, offers modules that contextualise and set the scene, as well as exploring the sources and methodologies and helps link families to communities.
As well as educating with a view to participants gaining employment in this field, the centre also conducts private research and is currently conducting contextualised genealogies for a number of celebrities, most recently Riverdance creator Bill Whelan.
For such studies David Butler, academic director with IARC, explains, “They have to subject themselves to interview and have to supply all manner of materials in terms of ancestral diary entries, family portraits, photos, family certificates and membership cards. They have to nominate any and all existing compos mentis elderly relatives for interview.
“With Bill Whelan, we have interviewed his sole surviving aunt from his mother’s side and cousins and further out relatives. The most important thing with this research is to cross off all the possibilities before hitting the archives. It is wasteful of any time to hit the archives first and to find out that someone else had done all that already,” he said.
“The first reason we exist is to train people to do their own research and to train other educationalists to train other people. We are not trying to keep it to all to ourselves,” David explains.
The research might lead them to relatives who were actors in the 1798 rebellion, those on the run during the Civil War or trade unionists in the Dublin lockout by using their existing visual material. Asked how far back this research can go, David says if an individual is a descendant of an Irish Roman Catholic tenant farmer, renting land from a landlord, it is possible to go back to the 1820s and sometimes back to 1770s and 1780s.
The third aspect of IARC is digitisation and it is scanning vulnerable handwritten manuscripts and texts for libraries and archives and individuals.
For more information contact 061 518355, visit www.irisharc.org or drop into the Tierney Building at the University of Limerick.