Webinar Resources

Movement from the United States to Canada was unrestricted and unrecorded until April 1908. The U.S. only began recording the entry of Canadians along its northern border in 1894. Before that, many thousands of people, including our Celtic ances-tors, lived cross-border lives without visas, work permits, passports, or immigration records. Learn how to find these elusive ancestors.

Researching the specific location of Irish Ancestors is challenging. The creative use of online databases, coupled with free software, affords researchers the opportunity to pinpoint townlands and the locations where distant ancestors actually lived and worked.

Our Irish ancestors did not immigrate on a whim. They often followed in the foot-steps of other family members or their neighbors and friends. Learn about the history of chain migration including well known routes from specific Irish locations to cities and regions in North America. Discover strategies for recognizing and exploring chain migration in your family. This program is presented by IGSI in partnership with the Yankee Genealogical Society (yankeegs.org).

Church records offer some of the earliest evidence we have for Irish family history. Using the records of the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, this talk explores what records were made, what survives, and where and how to access them. Irish church records are an indispensable source for social history and allow us to trace a rapidly changing Irish society.

Millions of U.S. passenger arrival records are available online; even more are not yet indexed from ships’ passenger manifests stored on microfilm at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. How can you tell when your ancestor came to the North America? Searching ship’s manifests and other historical records may provide you with clues about an ancestor’s date and ship of arrival in the U.S. Major resources for finding U.S. (and some Canadian) immigration information are discussed and listed in the class handout with links to online repositories and helpful online how-to reading materials.

This talk outlines the origins and structure of the names of Irish places and explains the historical reasons for the variations in place names encountered in Irish records, caused by a process of anglicization of Irish or Gaelic place names over a long period. We will also outline the land divisions and places that required naming, and the practices that applied in this process.
It also shows key sources that are available to help in finding currently accepted placenames; and the books and websites available to provide the details of the locations of places; the name variations that applied; and maps of different scales and vintages. For each source the type of information contained is shown, and how these reference sources can be found.

Property leaves traces long after people vanish. This talk looks at historic Irish institutions that recorded property transactions (The Registry of Deeds) and that created property tax records (The Valuation Office).They are two of the oldest intact record-holding institutions in Ireland and both provide (relatively) unbroken chains of evidence reaching back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Genealogist Chris Paton draws together many potential land and vital records resources to tell the story of an Irish family and their farm in County Kilkenny across the 19th and 20th centuries. Using an array of resources (vital records, newspapers, land records, census and military records) he shows how the genealogical narrative of the family was established from the 1820s to the mid-20th century. Along the way he takes the family's and property's story from its humblest of agricultural beginnings, to a dramatic episode of the Irish Civil War, and beyond.

The ancestral facts we labor to find, seem to us as precious as gold. Yet these nuggets can seem dry to a reader when recited as a family history. How can we make our ancestral histories engaging to our broader family? Some genealogists choose to fictionalize their histories. However, the broader audience can dismiss “recreated” scenes or “reimagined” dialogue. They want to know what really happened. At the opposite extreme of the "encyclopedic" approach.

Free to members - Historians estimate that Ireland was first settled by humans about 10,000 years ago. To our knowledge no one has traced their ancestors back that far but…wouldn’t you like to know what was happening in Ireland when your ancestors did live there? Join us as Dr. MacCotter takes us on an overview journey through Irish history. He touches briefly on all the key issues, challenging the many myths and legends and replacing them with the true picture of who are the Irish and what is their history.

Names are the most powerful means of identifying ancestors. In this presentation, we illustrate three name-based techniques for tracing Irish ancestors: name-variant research, cluster genealogy, and surname heat maps.  Cluster genealogy focuses on researching extended family and Irish neighbors who may have the same origins as your illusive immigrant ancestors.

Irish genealogy is notoriously difficult, so researchers must apply creative tools and techniques - as well as use creative records - to obtain positive results. Explore a variety of routes through Irish family history and learn more about the collections available on Findmypast and elsewhere.

Passenger lists for those leaving Great Britain and Ireland did not start until 1890. Passenger lists were required by the USA to include each passenger's name, birthdate/age, port of departure, name of ship, arrival date, and port of arrival. However, before this period they were not compulsory. Availability of passenger lists for eighteenth and early nineteenth century are quite rare, and in many cases non-existent.

Expert Maurice Gleeson explores various ways in which DNA and documentary evidence can work hand in hand to break through your Irish Brick Walls. Topics to be explored include: characterizing each Irish Brick Wall; Irish Naming Convention; ways to grab the low hanging fruit; working with Clusters; Triangulated Segments; triangulating with Y-DNA and mtDNA; and Ancestor Reconstruction.

This webinar will help you develop a solid foundation for your research. First you will learn simple tools, including identity profiles and timelines, to organize what you know and provide a springboard for future investigation. Then Shirleen and Lois will teach you how to use those tools to develop detailed, focused questions that will target your research and make it more efficient and productive.

Free to members -  Maria Flynn Conway, a native of Waterford, Ireland, is a St. Paul, MN based tour operator specializing in Ireland. She will answer basic traveler questions such as when should you go to Ireland, planning an itinerary, transportation, where to stay, what to do before you leave, what to pack, where to eat, and all the other questions you have whether you are planning your own trip or going with a group.

Gasp! Not all the records you need to find your ancestors in Ireland are online. You NEED to go to Ireland! In this presentation, Fiona Fitzsimons will help prepare you for researching in Ireland. She'll take you through what you need to do to prepare the groundwork for your research trip (opening hours, access, finding aids, catalogues, etc.), introduce you to cultural institutions (NLI, NAI, PRONI) and repositories (Valuation Office, Registry of Deeds) plus clue you in to local evidence in your ancestor's county of birth (county libraries).

Dozens of websites now offer substantial support for Irish family history research. Most fall into one or more categories: web portals, Irish archives/libraries/record offices, government programs, genealogy companies with Irish content, genealogical and historical societies and county websites. This session will focus on the Irish record collections available on FamilySearch, Ancestry and FindMyPast.

Learn the basics of working "smarter" instead of "harder" when it comes to managing genealogy data. We'll cover setting up genealogy projects and tracking them to completion, using a research log to track research, and how to better manage your genealogy data files.

Free to members - link here  Hit a brick wall with your family history research? Not enough time to research before your family reunion or trip to Ireland? Have you ever thought of hiring a professional genealogist? Get tips and insights for finding, hiring, and working with professional genealogists from our panel of professionals based in the U.S. and Ireland.

Most Irish genealogy databases are for-fee (FindMyPast, RootsIreland, JohnGrenham) and the major providers (Ancestry, FamilySearch) share much of the data. This session  focuses on the content and differences among the major providers.

Are you new to Irish genealogy or perhaps it has been a while since you dug into your Irish family roots? This is the webinar for you! Tom Rice will provide an introduction to the key tools for finding your ancestors in Ireland: most important record types, Irish geographic terms, Irish names, key Irish genealogy websites and books, and much, much more.

Using published and online primary sources, uncover the story of the migration of the Irish to Canada before and during The Great Famine. This webinar will review the different immigration schemes including the Peter Robinson settlers to Ontario, the Monaghan Settlers to Atlantic Canada, and assisted immigration to Quebec. Learn how to find records about their departure from Ireland and arrival into Canada, including quarantine stations at Partridge Island and Grosse Ile.

Rita Davern is a Minnesota woman who searched for the place and people her grandmother left behind. The quest took her to the Burren: a beautiful, windswept region of County Clare, Ireland. There she found a clan - and its medieval legacy - that were scattered and lost during some of the most difficult centuries in Irish history. 

Free for all to view.  Click on the title to view the webinar (opens in a new browser window). Note we no longer have viewing rights to the film itself.

Parish registers, census returns, Griffith's Valuation, and civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths provide a great beginning for Irish family history research. However, a careful search of record repositories in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom reveals more: collections of estate papers, tenement and townland valuations, valuation revision books, tithe applotments, poor law registers, vestry minutes, ordinance survey maps, deeds and memorials, National School registers, militia lists, electoral rolls, Petty Sessions court registers, Irish Reproductive Loan Fund records, outrage papers, and much more. 

This presentation will discuss what's behind your DNA results, what your ethnicity estimates might mean, how to determine your relationship to your matches, and what all of this can do to forward your family research. Takeaways from this webinar: How the major four DNA testing companies differ; reliability of ethnicity estimates; and, determining and communicating with cousin matches. There is a four-page handout plus two relationship charts.

FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world - and it's over 4+ billion records are available to you for free! Tom Rice will help you navigate among the FamilySearch website. For beginner or experienced researchers.  Find tips and techniques to help fill in the branches on your tree.

This fascinating story and Jane's experience finding the information is bound to help you with researching your Irish ancestors, no matter where in Ireland they hailed from.

Free for all to view.  Click on the title to view the webinar (opens in a new browser window)

Unlike many other records, parish registers provide evidence of direct links between one generation and the next (via baptismal registers) and one family and another (via marriage registers).