Have you noticed in online civil indexes of registered births ( up to 1915) that your searches for a given name will return children born to either a father or mother of that name? In addition to children registered with that surname, it will also return births of children born to a mother with that maiden name.
This is another real bonus of irishgenealogy. Up to now, it has been necessary, when searching civil records to establish the name of a woman’s husband to trace her children forward in civil records.
So, we might have an ancestor in a household in the 1901 Census, with their brothers and sisters. By searching civil indexes for the surname in the defined Poor Law Union (as indicated in the Census) you may see children born not just of that surname to the male ancestors, but also to women whose maiden name this is. Heretofore, without knowing what married name the sisters might have taken, the search would be prolonged. We might search forward to 1911 and note the absence of the sisters. Reasonable to assume they married in the intervening years. Search for their marriages and then search for the registration of births of children under their husband’s name.
Now this process can be short circuited and we can more easily see the children not just of our ancestors brothers, but , with less effort, those of our ancestors’ sisters.
Anything that makes identifying the family of female ancestors more accessible is to be welcomed!
By Carmel Gilbride
