Online maps to help in tracing Irish ancestry
In Boston this week, Ordinance Survey Ireland launched its genealogy mapping service for the families of immigrants who want to pinpoint where their ancestors were reared.
The online archive of 30,000 maps will be available through the internet and provide a resource that previously only existed in paper form in the country’s libraries.
Stephen Curran of the OSI said maps are a valuable key in unlocking a lot of details about the background to people’s families.
“The first step for most people is to know where they come from, which is difficult in a lot of cases because there might be a few townlands with the same name ... people who moved abroad would have where they came from registered from when they first arrived,” he said.
“You can connect a lot of different things just from knowing where the location is on the right map, like looking for deaths, marriages and births and start to put things together.”
The service became available after the OSI undertook to scan all the maps compiled during the 19th century by thousands of British soldiers and officials.
They contain detail not replicated on any map of the country since.
It is thought that the Irish diaspora will be able to find the townland of their relations and use the maps as the first step to identify the churches, schools and villages that should contain details of their ancestors.
“Back then you had about 3,000 British soldiers going around the country collecting information and that is a huge level of resources to be able to overlay onto modern maps,” Mr Curran said.
The OSI has used all of the six-inch scaled maps drawn up in the 1840s and the 25-inch maps compiled 20 years later and layer them together for the online database.
It has also made the service available free in the libraries around Ireland for local historians and genealogy enthusiasts.
Online access to the maps is available for €5 on www.osi.ie.
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