Scotch-Irish-L Archives

From:
Subject: Re: [S-I] Poll Tax Returns (1660), Subsidy Roll (1662),Parish Vestry Book (1733-1876)
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:50:15 +0000

Hi Kevin, there's three places to start your search:

1. Proni
2. Internet
3. A standard reference like Grenham's 'tracing your Irish Ancestors" or Ryan's "Irish Records".

PRONI (Public Records Office of Northern Ireland) has an immense website. I was just there now doing some estate research. It is unlikely to have the exact record on line, but it will tell you if it exists. If it exists, then check 2, 3, and LDS's catalog, and finally Hayes (more later) to see if you can get it without going to Belfast. You can search and you can read their extremely useful guide to Irish records. It's VERY HELPFUL to read these guides. People are endlessly writing them, but it's amazing how few of us have actually read any of them. As I said in an earlier post ....we have seen the enemy and he is us <grin>! I fear we may do the same when driving as when doing genealogy research...don't bother learning...we know it all already ! Hope in car and head for the freeway....

Anyhow, here's the URL to their page on poll taxes, etc: http://www.proni.gov.uk/records/17cent.htm

On to Google. Many of the counties have great websites, especially Tyrone. Google. Check a couple. There's a LOT of stuff out there. Also google for specific records like Kilrea Poll tax. Whatever. Check the genuki pages and the freepages etc. Don't stop with one aggregation or project.

Kernohan is online free at http://www.4qd.org/bann/index.html?Home=+Home+

Frequently you can find lists of what is available by county on line at Fianna (google).

Also books like the ones I typed above have them. You turn to the county and check. Often you can learn where the manuscript is besides the original repository. The FHL film number may be listed. Maybe the authors of Fianna on line know it and put on the web. Maybe Ryan did. Maybe only Grenham. Check all three. No one knows it all. I use Ryan "Irish Records" a lot.

Then,
4. FHL catalog. Do placename searches for the county and parish. There's well over a hundred microfilm from PRONI in the FHL, plus the ones from Armagh Museum, etc, etc, etc. Do lots of searching in the catalog as you don't know how the cataloger cataloged it. Usually poeple are a lot like hyperactive two year olds: they search for 2 seconds and give up. Then they try to email someone who they hope will find it for them or they give up. Hey, it's YOUR family history, so lay off the the caffeine and spend a little time searching. I suspect it takes six months or so to learn to use the catalog effectively. Before that, stuff's there but you can't find it. Even now after years of using it, I can't find stuff I found before. It's not easy and takes more than two seconds.

Then...eh....I forget.....Ah! The indexes. there's indexes for Ireland. Hayes is one. You can learn more at www.rootsweb.com/~bifhsusa -- the Irish guide.

However all this stuff is pre-typewriter. The clerk who wrote the names was taught a different script from ourselves. It's very VERY hard to read. So it can be disappointing or very misleading to try to interpret the original yourself. If the manuscript was published and apparently transcribed by a scholar -- it's far more likely to be 'right' than what you or I, with no training in the script or experience, can get out of it. Or we make an erroneous deduction. So don't make a mad dash for the original, bypassing published transcriptions. Get one of those too. Get a couple even. It's amazing how different they can be.

If you check Fianna (http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/guide/) you can get a list of the 101 level stuff. Or check Ryan Irish Records or Grenham "Tracing your Irish Ancestors". Most stuff can be got. Ignore some like the 17th century books of survey and distribution. I have viewed these in Belfast...only name 'big guys'. Unless yours is a known 'big guy', forget.... Your goal here is to figure out how early you can find your name or people and where. Ideally the townland. That's because you want to find out what estate they lived on. Then you can do estate research. To do that go up to 1 and repeat.

For the Tithe Applotment and Griffiths Valuation, there's cds with the indexes, but always check the original. You can do that on line these days. I forge the name of the website. Google. However many parishes are transcribed. The transcriptions might omit the most important thing of all. That's the name of the immediate lessor -- the land lord. Even if he rented from some middle man, check the large estate records. Doesm't mean the prior 40 generations of your ancestors rented from the same middle man.

When you need stuff you can only get in PRONI, www.ulsterancestry.com (Robert) is very good at retrieving stuff for you. Also got a LOT of free stuff on the website.

Back I go now to surfing for the estates that townlands are in. I found 3, in two different estates. A couple must be in smaller ones. They're near Stewartstown and Cookstown, SE Tyrone, barony of Dungannon, largely. In case anyone's cracked this nut before!! Plus some of these parishes are also in Derry, like Ardtrea or Artrea....which also has a spelling issue, complicating the googling. PRONI has an index of townlands in large estates. Very helpful!

If the DNA test shows my client is related to a known descendent of this group of people, Robert will have some more work from ourselves. Otherwise....sigh, I think it'll be time to consider bingo as a new hobby.

For more recent stuff, www.emeraldancestors.com is putting indexes to all the Northern Ireland civil registration on line. Before...you went to the FHL and checked microfilm. Urg.... What I found transformed our understanding of the surname in Ireland, though we're looking in the 1700s and this is all post 1850. Basically, so many moved to Belfast from Down who spelled the surname a certain way (of all religions) that when the handful of people in Tyrone moved there, their surname was spelled the County Down way. What happened to these people? They got assimilated into the County Downers. So we found the cost of a month's membership quite reasonable. Will join again later to see what is new.

Linda Merle

-------------- Original message --------------
From:

> In J.W. Kernohan's 1912 history of "The Parishes of Kilrea & Tamlaght O'Crilly....." he cites as sources the Poll Tax Returns of 1660, The Subsidy
> Roll
> of 1662 and the Parish Vestry Book (1733-1876).
>
> Do digital versions of these documents exist? If so, where would one go to
> get information from them?
>
> Also, Linda Merle made reference to the value of Muster Rolls in identifying
> Protestant residents. I have seen the Muster Rolls imbedded in Mr.
> Kernohan's treatise, but no others. And I'm not sure where to begin looking
> for
> them. Any help in that direction would be greatly appreciated as well; Co.
> Derry
> and Co. Antrim are the locales of specific interest.
>
> Many thanks.
>
> Kevin McCaughey
> Maryland, USA
>
>
>
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