 "Island Living" inspired by frequent visits to Clare Island off the coast of the West Of Ireland in County Mayo painted by Irish Artist Shay Maguire There are many records available to those tracing their family history, and it’s often worth examining and comparing the details they contain more closely. One revealing approach is to note what appears in one record of an event but is missing from another. For instance, church records often provide additional clues not shown in the civil records.
When we pore over baptism and marriage records, most of us focus on the main names - the bride, the groom, the child, the parents. But look just to the side of those lines, and you’ll often find another story quietly waiting to be told. The witnesses and sponsors - those extra names squeezed in to margins or scrawled at the bottom - were rarely random. They were the people our ancestors trusted most, and sometimes they hold the keys to unlocking entire branches of a family tree.
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 An Gorta Mór Garden, Carndonagh, Co. Donegal Inishowen Workhouse
Carndonagh, Co. Donegal, Ireland Have you ever stopped to imagine what life might have looked like in Inishowen a century or two ago? Picture a windswept peninsula in Ireland’s northwest, where rocky soil and tough winters made daily survival an unrelenting task. Now imagine trying to raise a family there in the 1800s, when failed crops, poor health, and economic hardship could push a household over the edge in a matter of weeks. When things fell apart, where could people turn? For many, the answer - grim though it was - came in the form of the local workhouse. In Carndonagh, at the heart of the Inishowen Peninsula, one such institution opened its doors in 1843. Known as the Inishowen Workhouse, it was designed to be a last refuge for those with nowhere else to go. |
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