Have you ever wanted to visit the ancestral homeland for one of your ancestors? Not sure where or how to begin?
Engaging in ancestry travel, or what the industry also calls heritage travel, can be daunting. For one, it can be expensive. It also takes years of genealogy and DNA research to identify the actual town or property from where your ancestor originated. Once we have this information, pre-planning and site research can become overwhelming.
Ancestry travel is different than traveling internationally to visit foreign archives, libraries, and family history centers. The former is travel to an ancestor’s known location of residence to see the old homestead, walk village streets, talk with locals, visit the community church and graveyard, and generally absorb the local culture. The latter is travel to a research facility to search for information and clues that may ultimately lead to your ancestor’s hometown. It would be costly and disappointing to engage in research travel with the hope of turning it into ancestry travel within the same trip. Plan for each separately.
I would like to share my journey and advice for ancestry travel using Northern Ireland as the context, which I’m traveling to next month. I offer three steps to help you plan for your trip of a lifetime.
Step 1 – Select Your Immigrant Ancestor
Going back to just our 5th great grandparents, we have 128 direct ancestors. So, to keep yourself focused, pick one ancestor – just one. It may sound intuitive but pick an ancestor whose name is known to you and whose place of birth, baptism, or last residence is similarly known. As previously stated, ancestry travel is not the time to engage in research to identify the town or ancestor’s name. Your immigrant ancestor’s name and hometown should be known.
Through my previous research, which I publish on my website and was featured on the Research Like A Pro genealogy podcast episode 198 and episode 199, I was fortunate to identify the Northern Ireland town from which my 6th great grandfather, John Wilson (1715-1799), originated. Truth be told, with records being so sparse for 16th century Northern Ireland, I could only narrow it down to one of two towns – Derryhillagh or Cavancarragh, which are both east of Enniskillen in County Fermanagh and within two miles of each other. As my research report details, this was about as close as I was going to get, but it was enough for me.
Step 2 – Establish Your Ancestry Travel Goals
What we hope or expect to accomplish with ancestry travel will be different for each of us. Some of us will have more information than others permitting us to see and do more. Some may respond more strongly to physically touching a gravestone or the old homestead or walking on the same land, while others may wish to engage with modern day descendants or in activities enjoyed by the locals. There are no rules. Nevertheless, here a couple of not-so-obvious items to do regardless of your goals that I learned in a 2017 trip to County Mayo, Ireland to visit the ancestral homeland for my Duffy and Minnigan ancestors:
When meeting with locals, ask someone in your travel group to be the scribe, or better yet, record it on your smartphone (with permission, of course). We can become so engrossed in the conversation and stories that we may forget much of it when we later try to recount it. Indeed, when meeting with the village “historian” in a local pub in Toormakeady, County Mayo, neither my sister nor I took notes. We both struggled to remember some key points.- Take a photo with the road sign marking the boundaries of your ancestor’s hometown. It’s a photo everyone will enjoy, and you’ll never forget the local and current spelling of the town.
- When establishing your itinerary, give yourself a couple of days margin to follow new leads or reschedule appointments should unforeseen situations arise. If you truly finish early, prepare some “additional” sightseeing opportunities to make the most of your trip.
The Northern Ireland Context. One of my ancestry travel goals for my heritage trip to Northern Ireland next month is to walk the same grounds where my 6th great grandfather John Wilson likely walked. John left County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland about 1740 and records in Ireland are quite sparse at this time. So, I had to be flexible with my goals. Simply, I just wanted to experience the land where he probably lived.
To do this, I had to use the oldest and consistently available records identifying exact land ownership, which are Griffith’s Valuation. These records detail taxable land and built property listed by the owner and occupier. It also provides maps. The valuation occurred between 1847 and 1864, but in the area where my ancestors lived, it occurred in 1862.[1] Based on my prior research, I could only narrow down that John Wilson either hailed from the townland of Derryhillagh or Cavancarragh, which are only two miles from one another in County Fermanagh. Therefore, my goal is to walk both properties.
Although Griffith’s Valuation occurred about 120 years after my ancestor left, it is probable that the land where John Wilson lived was still owned by a Wilson descendant in 1862. Indeed, at this time, it was important for land holdings to remain with the family name often times inherited by the oldest son.[2] While I have researched Griffith’s Valuation for both Derryhillagh and Cavancarragh, I am providing examples here for only Cavancarragh for interest of space. The excerpt for Cavancarragh, which straddled two pages, is combined below into one image.
In the above image, I concentrated on property to which Wilsons were the primary lessors, which indicates they either owned the property outright or had primary tenancy from the local lord. As identified in the red boxes, these properties were labeled on the maps as 5, 21, 23, and 25. In the map provided by the website askaboutireland.ie for Griffith’s Valuation of Cavancarragh, I have highlighted the properties in green using Microsoft PowerPoint’s freeform shape feature. The gaps in land ownership between the Wilson properties may hint to property sold or given to others and may be worthy of future research. The purple circles I have added to the map identify built property and help to separate homes from farmland.
One of the great map features provided by the askaboutireland.ie website for Griffith’s Valuation is the toggle between the historic Griffith’s Valuation maps and modern-day Google maps. Here, you can view modern roads, businesses, and other important landmarks to help you locate the appropriate property. I’ve copied and pasted my property outlines and built structure circles onto the modern-day Google map. In the image below, you can see that the Cavancarragh Youth Club appears to be on the site of one of the old 1862 homesteads on property #21. Google doesn’t identify the names for all the roads, so my experience next month will be interesting, but at the minimum, it will aid in my hasty discovery of the ancestral origins of my Wilson family.
A sliding bar also permits you to view the historic and modern maps simultaneously allowing an easier identification of interested property when one drives through the area. Again, I’ve overlayed my property outlines and built structure circle identifiers onto the image.
Step 3 – Make Contacts in Advance of Travel
While it depends on your travel goals, make contacts ahead of time. Because of Covid, many libraries, archives, family history centers, and government offices have reduced hours or have specific criteria or documents for entering the facility. Make contact before you book your travel. If you have limited time in a location, make sure the facility is open on the days you’re going to be there. Check for local holidays that might cause offices to be closed.
Beyond facilities holding obvious records, such as archives, libraries, churches, and government offices, consider contacting other researchers who are researching your family or who have visited your ancestor’s town. Review old mailing lists or message boards. You’ll be surprised who has already done what you’re about to do. I belong to the Wilson Y-DNA group, and one of the most active members of the group has been to Derryhillagh more than once and has offered great advice.
Contact DNA matches who live or have lived in the area. Ask for their advice on visiting the town or contacting other locals.
During my research on John Wilson, I found a footnote (really, a footnote) in a book about the family papers of the Earl of Belmore that described a 1707 improvement to his Castle Coole estate that was adjacent to the property of a Wilson family, “who could trace his family back in the male line, in the same farm, to this [1881] time.”[3] I contacted the archivist at Castle Coole, and she is putting me in contact with an older local resident who holds significant knowledge about the Wilson families of the area. The castle, which is open to the public, likely played an important part in the lives of my early ancestors, who were part of the Ulster Planation into County Fermanagh from Scotland in the early 1600s. I’m looking forward to providing context and insight into how life and land management worked during this time and how it influenced John Wilson to immigrate to Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Concluding Comments
In addition to providing three steps to guide the preparation for ancestry travel, I hope my use of the Griffith’s Valuation maps provided by the askaboutireland.ie website instills confidence in the ability to find your ancestor’s homestead in modern day Ireland. In my next post, I hope to share with you my experiences and research results from my visit to Derryhillagh and Cavancarragh.
Sources
[1] Library Development, LGMA (2023). Years of Publication [Griffith’s Valuation]. Dublin, Ireland: Library Development, Local Government Management Agency, retrieved 22 May 2023 from https://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/irish-genealogy/what-is-griffiths-valuati/years-of-publication/
[2] Gray, Jane (2012). “Household formation, inheritance and class-formation in nineteenth century Ireland: evidence from County Fermanagh” in Inheritance Practices, Marriage Strategies and Household Formation in European Rural Societies, A. Head-Konig and P. Pozsgai (eds.), Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishing, p. 153-180.
[3] Lowry-Corry, Somerset Richard (The Earl of Belmore) (1881), The History of the Two Ulster Manors of Finagh in the County of Tyrone and Coole, Otherwise Major Atkinson, in the County of Fermanagh, and their Owners, London: Longmans, Green, & Co, p. 149.