A new perspective on my Irish roots, thanks to the Irish Family History Centre at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum

I didn't expect to be impressed by my genealogy consultation with the Irish Family History Centre at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, but I was happily proven wrong.

Though born and bred in New Jersey, I consider myself lucky to have always had a strong understanding of where my family in Ireland came from.

My dad was born and raised in (you guessed it) Co Kerry. He came here to the US in the 1980s and eventually met and married my mom, an American whose parents were from Co Galway and Co Mayo.

I can rattle off my connections to Ireland, tracing my not-so-distant family links to Moll's Gap / Black Valley, Kilchreest / Loughrea, and Inishkea / Belmullet, and I've been able to visit them all several times throughout my life.

That's why, when it was pitched to me to do a genealogy consult with the Irish Family History Centre for a partnership with IrishCentral, I naively thought that there wouldn't be much new they could tell me.

I assumed - wrongly, as it happens - that this was a service better suited for people of Irish descent who don't already have a strong handle on their Irish origins.

Ticket desk at the Irish Family History Centre in EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin.

Soon enough, I was scheduled for a virtual online consultation with one of Irish Family History Centre's genealogy experts, Dave.

At the start of the consult, Dave asked me what I already knew, if anything, about my Irish roots, and I gave him the rundown of my links to Cos Kerry, Mayo, and Galway.

The Irish Family History Centre have a range of services, from a 50-minute consult all the way up to a full research project that takes weeks to complete. Given that my consult was the 50-minute session, and seeing as there wasn't one specific branch I wanted to look at, Dave suggested we focus on my grandma's roots in Co Mayo.

As he began to deftly dig into an array of online databases, Dave noted that it is helpful to go into a consultation with some locations, even if vague, on hand. I was also able to provide Dave with surnames and maiden names, which helped narrow down his search.

Impressively quickly, Dave located the 1938 birth index for my grandmother, which showed her mother's (my great-grandmother's) maiden name.

From there, he was able to track down my great-grandparents' 1935 civil marriage certificate. I was moved to see it was a scan of an original, handwritten copy, now more than 90 years old. My great-grandparents were married on October 2, 1935, at the Church of Binghamstown in Belmullet, Co Mayo. My great-grandfather was listed as a bachelor farmer, and my great-grandmother as a spinster. At the time, they were living at Surge View in Glosh, a homestead I visited when I was younger.

Their civil marriage record includes both of their father's names, which helped guide Dave as he dug further back, uncovering even more birth, marriage, census, land, and death records.

My great-grandparents' marriage record.

Understandably, there were slight variations in the chain of surnames, as the original copies were handwritten. While someone like me might have hit a dead end here, Dave was able to piece the clues together to trace back even further.

Perhaps the most moving bit Dave shared with me was that, based on the 1855 Griffith's Valuation, my maternal grandmother's predecessors in Inishkea lived in "basically a mud hut" -  just a few generations but still a far cry from my apartment in New York.

My family's records in the 1855 Griffiths Valuation.

At the end of our consultation, which produced far more documents than I would have expected, Dave sent me an email with screenshots of original records he was able to pull up and links to the databases where they can be found - a handy resource.

All in all, I was deeply moved to see original copies, some more than a century old, of my family's records in Co Mayo. I know I wouldn't have been able to locate them all on my own, and certainly not in under an hour.

You, like me, may know your Irish family history, but seeing it in writing puts it in a whole new light. Plus, with the release of the 1926 Census of Ireland on April 18, there is a whole new wave of documents and records waiting to be explored. 

You can learn more about EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum's Irish Family History Centre genealogy consultations here. EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum is offering IrishCentral readers 15% off online genealogy consultations with the code IRISHCENTRAL15.