Sometimes, Older is Better

When our family history takes us across the Atlantic to homes in other countries, we need reliable resources to achieve our research goals. As I work on the roots of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly, I've been faced with a collection of place names in County Kerry but I'm lacking any sense of place. Especially when it comes to the concept of townlands, I have no way to relate. I need a map.

Fortunately, Google brought me back in time to a website resource which, years ago, I had known all too well. In its heyday, it was a go-to site for those of us chomping at the bit to use online resources for genealogy—before archives and other repositories were ready to technologically accommodate the deluge of our research demands.

That old resource was called RootsWeb. Originally a smorgasbord of family history tidbits submitted by users around the world in that each-one-help-another spirit, it is now hosted, years after it was launched, by Ancestry.com. Thankfully, many of the original submissions posted on the site are still preserved and accessible. Many of the pages put up by individuals and collectives included efforts which were not only helpful back then in the late 1990s and past the turn of the century, but useful today, as well. It's just that now the material is in read-only format.

Yes, it's been about thirty years since RootsWeb appeared on the online genealogy scene, but now that I'm puzzling over County Kerry townlands for my father-in-law's Falvey roots, what should appear in my Google search, but a link leading me to a wonderful old RootsWeb post on that very subject. And—this is the important part—it includes a series of maps.

Granted, for this month's research puzzle, I had been using the Irish website, townlands.ie, and it is indeed helpful. But frozen in time in the RootsWeb collection is a page explaining Civil Parishes of County Kerry, with links to townland lists and maps. Thus, scrolling down that page to the section containing the map of County Kerry's eighty seven civil parishes, I can click on Kilcummin, for instance, and find the Falvey family's former residence in Knockauncore, just as the church records had indicated. And when I start finding Johanna Falvey and her husband, John Kelly, appearing in townlands in other civil parishes—Killeentierna, for instance, as we'll see next week—I can see the location for myself, and determine the distance between each townland.

The RootsWeb website is now read-only, since its functionality has morphed over the years as computer technology requirements have, by necessity, had to change and upgrade. Seeing what has happened in the effort to preserve Rootsweb over the decades, I shudder to think that someday, that one section of the website with those helpful maps might disappear. My many thanks to those who worked to create those interlinking resources—and I hope those resources remain accessible. But just in case, I did print out a copy of the maps so I could make some handwritten notes as I follow the Falveys and Kellys about in County Kerry. This may be an "old" resource, but it certainly has not lost its usefulness.