Irish Records – Page 3 – International Institute of Genealogical Studies

Ulster Historical Foundation Lecture Tour, 2015: Yakima, Washington

By Deborah Dale, student Whether or not three brothers on my paternal side really did make the journey from Ulster to Maryland during the seventeenth century is beside the point. The point is that I recently traveled to Yakima, Washington to attend several fantastic lectures hosted by the Yakima Valley Genealogical Society and presented by Fintan Mullan and Gillian Hunt of the Ulster Historical Foundation, who were winding down their 2015 genealogy lecture tour. I arrived just in time for the introductions of the speakers and the first lecture. After giving my name at the registration area, I picked up my conference packet, which included pages and pages in a spiral-bound book created by PRONI (the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland), which began with a section on How to Trace Your Family Tree and continued with sections on the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses, census substitutes, wills and probate, church records, valuation records, national education records, and much more. The room was full with only a few seats still open. I sat down at a table at the back of the room as Fintan Mullan started speaking, and as I noticed various flyers of family history resources lying on the table, which apparently complemented my conference packet and included a nice heritage map of the Ulster Plantation, large enough to hang on a wall. Also included was a flyer from the Irish Manuscripts Commission, a public body established in 1928 that promotes access to sources of Irish history and culture.…

Irish Landed Estate Records: Piepowder, Anyone?

By Deborah Dale, Student My binder, full of material from the course, Irish: Land Administration Records felt somewhat heavy after eight weeks of studying. I carried it to my desk, to the open spot between several stacks of files, along with some just brewed coffee. At the window I paused to look at the gray sky and wondered if it resembled the color over County Waterford — on what was perhaps a cool January morning in 1851 – when my 3rd great grandfather Michael Higgins, a Roman Catholic tenant farmer, could have walked the length of the land he occupied. I opened my binder to the module about Irish landed estate records (Module 4), which had been for me the most interesting, not only because these records include lists of tenants, but also because I had been suddenly, but enjoyably, catapulted into the history of a word I knew nothing about: piepowder. I will explain in a few moments. First, a couple of things about landed estate records: 1) they can be used as a substitute for Ireland’s nineteenth century census returns, which were mostly destroyed in the Four Courts fire of 1922, and 2) even though Module 4 gives a description of the most common estate documents, it does not fail to mention the difficulties a researcher may encounter during the search process. The module also mentions the right of Irish landowners to hold manorial courts. In Ireland, these consisted of the court-baron, the court-leet and the court of piepowder.…

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