Each newsletter we offer you a research tip written by one of our expert researcher’s, in the hope that we can somehow help along your genealogy path. This week Carmel Gilbride has written a research tip on.

Family History Research and what trends to be aware of

Each family is unique in its decisions and history. We see this over and over again in our work here at Eneclann. Nonetheless, as family historians we need to be mindful of the wider patterns at play.

Knowing the general trends of say, population movement, helps us deduce certain probabilities from these facts and guide us to making informed choices when selecting records online.  Working as we do in a post digitisation age, online records are selected, often without regard to the wider context.  We see a  record that matches some of our criteria and before we know it, we have ‘our ‘ ancestor, let’s just call her Mary “No Name”,  in a UK census; then back in Ireland having a child during the Great Famine;moving again to another part of the UK ; and returning to die in Ireland. In reality, it is very unlikely that this Mary “No Name” recorded in all these records is one and the same person. At all times our research needs to look for corroborative evidence from different sources while at the same time being mindful to locate our family in the wider narrative of history.

By Carmel Gilbride.