Tea at Trianon: Finding Irish Ancestors

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Finding Irish Ancestors

From Irish Central:

The parish register records are among the most crucial for anyone tracing their Irish ancestry. In many cases, these local baptism and marriage records are the only documented trail for descendants to explore since the Irish Censuses of 1821, 1831, 1841, and 1851 were burned in the Public Records Office when the Four Courts caught fire during the Irish Civil War.

The records released today contain 40 million names, cover 1,000 parishes across all 32 counties of Ireland, and form the most important resource for Irish ancestors prior to the 1901 census, allowing researchers to trace their roots back to pre-Famine Ireland.

These are the same records that were released online for free to wide applause by the National Library of Ireland at the end of 2014, except there’s one major difference. While the NLI’s Catholic Parish Registers database is fully digitized and searchable by parish, it isn’t indexed or searchable by other criteria such as name.

Findmypast’s offering marks the first time that National Library of Ireland’s collection of Irish Catholic Registers has been fully indexed with images to the original documents linked online. The records can now be searched by name, year and place, allowing relatives and historians the opportunity to make all important links between generations with the baptism records and between families with the marriage registers.

This ease of access will be a complete game changer in the search for one’s Irish ancestors. For many decades, gaining access to parish records involved a trip to Ireland and, in some cases, a visit to the parish in question, where a priest, a nun or an official from the parish office would be the gatekeeper to the records. (Read more.)