Tracing Your Irish Ancestors: The Complete Guide

This book is a great help for anyone trying to trace an Irish ancestor. It is very well organized, giving the reader both general information and information specific to localities. Many internet sites are listed. I would highly recommend this book to any Irish researcher.

I live in Ireland and I bought this book about October, 2001. It's an updated version of the 1993 book. Having looked through many books in libraries, I found this to be the ultimate guide to Irish genealogy. I have succeeded in tracing my family back to the eighteenth century from information about parish records, census records etc, as John lists them so well. It gives details of sources county by county in chronological order. The church record listing is also excellent. This is definitely the Irish genealogy bible.

This handy paperback is the first place to start for Irish research. Irish ancestors can be very elusive due to a variety of factors. Don't get frustrated - get educated. You CAN hunt your Emerald Isle ancestors successfully when armed with the knowledge in this book.While covering all of the standard civil, church, census, and land records, Grenham's book also covers wills, deeds, newspapers, directories, and other less-used records. The final third of the book is a county-by-county reference guide describing extant censuses and substitutes, available local histories, monumental inscriptions and other sources for each county.One of the outstanding features of the book is the Catholic parish maps for each county. These were drawn by the author's father and give the date of the earliest records available for each parish.A researcher with Irish heritage must be as indefatigable and adaptable as their own Irish forebears were in order find them in the existing records. This book is one of the tools you need to start with.

Tracing Your Irish Ancestors by professional Irish genealogist John Grenham is specifically written and designed to be used by researchers at all levels of experience, from the novice beginning to the seasoned professional. Organized into three major sections, Part 1 surveys the most basic genealogical sources for researching Irish ancestry; Part 2 provides a more advanced application of genealogical research project tools and resources; Part 3 is a reference guide to a comprehensive range of materials that include county source lists and church records. Also very highly recommended as a reference work for Irish-oriented genealogical researchers is the second edition of Brian Mitchell's A New Genealogical Atlas Of Ireland (080-6316845, $20.00).

This book has been a handy reference source in identifying what types of records are available for genealogical research in Ireland. Some guides to records by county.