Chris Paton - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records: A Guide for Family Historians

T RACING Y OUR I RISH A NCESTORS THROUGH L AND R ECORDS

Birth, Marriage & Death Records

The Family History Web Directory

Tracing British Battalions on the Somme

Tracing Great War Ancestors

Tracing History Through Title Deeds

Tracing Secret Service Ancestors

Tracing the Rifle Volunteers

Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors

Tracing Your Ancestors from 1066 to 1837

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Death Records Second Edition

Tracing Your Ancestors through Family Photographs

Tracing Your Ancestors Through Letters and Personal Writings

Tracing Your Ancestors Using DNA

Tracing Your Ancestors Using the Census

Tracing your Ancestors using the UK Timeline

Tracing Your Ancestors: Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk

Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors

Tracing Your Army Ancestors Third Edition

Tracing Your Birmingham Ancestors

Tracing Your Black Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Boer War Ancestors

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors

Tracing Your Canal Ancestors

Tracing Your Channel Islands Ancestors

Tracing Your Church of England Ancestors

Tracing Your Criminal Ancestors

Tracing Your Docker Ancestors

Tracing Your East Anglian Ancestors

Tracing Your East End Ancestors

Tracing Your Family History on the Internet

Tracing Your Female Ancestors

Tracing Your First World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Freemason, Friendly Society and Trade Union Ancestors

Tracing Your Georgian Ancestors, 17141837

Tracing Your Glasgow Ancestors

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Gallipoli Campaign

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: The Somme

Tracing Your Great War Ancestors: Ypres

Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors

Tracing Your Insolvent Ancestors

Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors

Tracing Your Jewish Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your Labour Movement Ancestors

Tracing Your Legal Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your London Ancestors

Tracing Your Medical Ancestors

Tracing Your Merchant Navy Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors

Tracing Your Northern Irish Ancestors Second Edition

Tracing Your Oxfordshire Ancestors

Tracing Your Pauper Ancestors

Tracing Your Police Ancestors

Tracing Your Potteries Ancestors

Tracing Your Pre-Victorian Ancestors

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestors: The First World War

Tracing Your Railway Ancestors

Tracing Your Roman Catholic Ancestors

Tracing Your Royal Marine Ancestors

Tracing Your Rural Ancestors

Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors

Tracing Your Second World War Ancestors

Tracing Your Servant Ancestors

Tracing Your Service Women Ancestors

Tracing Your Shipbuilding Ancestors

Tracing Your Tank Ancestors

Tracing Your Textile Ancestors

Tracing Your Twentieth-Century Ancestors

Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors

Tracing Your West Country Ancestors

Tracing Your Yorkshire Ancestors

Writing Your Family History

Your Irish Ancestors

A Guide for Family Historians

CHRIS PATON

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

PEN AND SWORD FAMILY HISTORY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Chris Paton 2021

ISBN 978 1 52678 021 8

eISBN 978 1 52678 022 5

The right of Chris Paton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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W hen carrying out ancestral research in Ireland, we traditionally start in the most recent years with the civil registration records generated by the state, north and south, which document births, marriages and deaths, and then try to travel further back in time with the use of parish records of varying denominations. Many of the problems that we might encounter along the way are caused by a range of issues, including the very existence of such records at certain periods in the past, and the details, or lack of, contained within those that have survived. Other resources may help to plug the gaps where the vital records fail, but perhaps none can do so more than land and property records, in their many varied forms.

Whilst our ancestors have come and gone through history, the landscape of Ireland itself has towered over everything as a constant. The very soil around us, the environment that nurtures us, is as much a silent witness to much that has gone on before our time as the DNA that leads us onwards from within. At times, the story of the island has intruded into our ancestral stories directly, motivating our ancestors passions and struggles for justice, whilst at other moments in the past it has stood by passively, silently observing, and providing a background context to other stories at play before it.

I was born in the County Antrim town of Larne, and was raised for much of my childhood in the nearby borough of Carrickfergus. Today I live just across the water from Carrick on the Ayrshire coast in Scotland, but to root the idea of my ancestral origins as an Ulsterman into my two boys, I once told them, when they were very young, that I owned the mighty Norman edifice that is Carrickfergus Castle, and that I was its king! The truthful reality is that for a couple of years as a small child I had simply lived in a small house just along the road from the castle.

Our home in the towns Robinsons Row was inherited by my father in 1979 from my grandmother Jean Paton (ne Currie) after she had passed away, and was the same property within which he had previously been raised as a wee boy himself many years earlier. For two years, we endured freezing trips to its outdoor toilet, based in a shed across the backyard, and lived in a house with no bathroom or shower, with just a single tap in the house producing water that had to be boiled on the gas cooker to wash with. Many people had regular baths; we had regular basins! To my father, who had just left the Royal Navy after fifteen years of service, it was now a relic from another era which was not suitable to raise his own children within. By the early 1980s, we had moved on to one of the new housing estates at the north end of the town, with a property boasting central heating, large outdoor gardens, and most impressively, an indoor loo and bathroom.