Origins of This Website

See also How to Use the Database, Notes on the Data, Services Offered

It all started in the 1990s when I began to study my own Co Leitrim origins. In time I found enough evidence to name and date, in at least outline detail, 5 or 6 generations of my direct ancestors, depending on the line followed. Then I thought it would be a good idea to look into the descendants of all of these, and this yielded names and details of many cousins. And of course many of these cousins married, and so the search broadened to look at the lines of the spouses of these cousins. And then for completeness the task turned to looking at the siblings and origins of these.

My original intention was to stop there and to publish, online, what I knew. But it made no sense to stop as the data kept growing and growing. I realised then that in what I had gathered there was considerable scope for study into subjects such as usage of first names, child mortality, marriage patterns, and so forth.

As the collection grew and the number of people included reached 3,000 I concluded that to delve deeply into each one of them, to uncover every detail of his or her life story, would take more time and years than I am likely to have left to me.

In addition, I have been providing a professional research service since 2008 and this has seen me conduct research in the records of every county of Ireland except Derry. My special interest has always been Co Leitrim and I did consider adding any other researched data from any Leitrim projects undertaken into my personal data collection but have so far shied away from this.

In 2016 I began work on a book that was finally published in 2018 - Tracing Your Leitrim Ancestors. This website is being launched partly to help publicise this book but also to provide outline details of the people I have included in my collection of data.

Like most other researchers, amateur or professional, I have looked at family trees that have been placed online. These vary from the excellent, with properly sourced data, to the awful, about which the less said the better.

I decided I would place my data online, but in a very summarised format. I did not want to use Ancestry or any of the other sites that house family trees, partly because I do not want to conform to their imposed formats and partly because I do not want my 'tree' to be included with others of poor quality.

The data shown on this site is, as said, very summarised, but behind it I have the details. As explained elsewhere on this site, anybody is welcome to browse the data on this site and use it as he or she sees fit. But for anybody who wants to learn more I will provide, for a small fee, the details I have captured.

For more information see: