10:00 – 11:30 Exhibitor Connect
An opportunity for participants can visit breakout rooms hosted by conference exhibitors to learn more about their products and services.
12:00 – 13:30 Church and State: Ireland’s Vital Records
with Chris Paton
In this session Chris will explore how to locate ancestors in Ireland using the civil registration records of births, marriages and deaths from 1845 and 1864 onwards, both online and in Ireland itself, as held at both the GROI in Roscommon and the GRONI in Belfast. It will examine what the records contain, how they may assist with research, and how they may be located online and offline via the platforms of the respective General Register Offices and government platforms, north and south. Chris will then look at the various church denominations in Ireland, how they were structured, and the types of records they kept. He will explain how to locate surviving material, to equally identify what has not survived (and why), and to understand where Protestant and Catholic Ireland occasionally overlapped, with the role of the Church of Ireland as the state church.
14:00 – 15:30 Forgotten Women: Researching the Marginalised Women on your Family Tree
with Janet Few
Even without meaning to, family historians often focus on the men on their family tree. It is usually the men who carry on the surname, who join the armed forces and who are more likely to write wills, to vote or to rent property, thereby leaving a trail in the documentary record. Merely by virtue of her gender, a female ancestor can become overlooked, and some women are even further on the margins than others. If we, as genealogists, do not research their lives and preserve their memories, who will? In this presentation Janet will use a series of case studies to describe the sources available to research the women who spent time in workhouses or asylums, the mothers of illegitimate children, prostitutes and those accused of witchcraft, amongst others.
16:00 – 17:30 The Irish DNA Atlas Project
with Edmund Gilbert
The extent of population structure within Ireland is largely unknown, as is the impact of historical migrations. Dr. Gilbert participated in a study of the Irish DNA Atlas, a dataset about a DNA cohort of individuals with four generations of ancestry linked to specific regions in Ireland. In this talk Dr. Gilbert will present the results of analyzing the genetic profiles of such individuals together with their genealogical profiles—revealing the relationship between Irish genetics and history along with the insights the researchers gained into both subjects.