Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 16, 2026
Researching Your Irish Surname: A Step-by-Step Guide
You know what your Irish surname means and roughly where it ruled — the question is how to turn that knowledge into your documented family. This is the workflow: seven steps that take a surname from etymology to ancestors, using tools covered across this site…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
How Irish Surnames Were Anglicized (And How to Reverse It)
Somewhere between a Connemara baptism and a Boston payroll, Mac Gabhann became Smith, Ó Maol Mhuaidh became Molloy, and ten thousand families acquired names their grandparents would not have recognised. The change was systematic — which is the good news, because systematic changes can be…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
O’, Mc, and Mac: What Irish Surname Prefixes Really Mean
Three letters — O’, Mc, Mac — carry most of the folklore in Irish naming, and most of the misinformation. No, Mc is not Irish while Mac is Scottish. No, the apostrophe is not possessive. And the great-grandfather who “dropped the O” was making a…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
The Most Common Irish Surnames and Their Meanings
Half of Irish America seems to be named Murphy, Kelly, or Sullivan — and there is a reason: a handful of great sept names account for a startling share of the island’s families. Carrying one is both a heritage and a research predicament. This guide…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
Irish Surname Origins: How Irish Last Names Work
Ireland named its families before almost anyone else in Europe — hereditary surnames were forming among the Gaelic Irish by the tenth and eleventh centuries, generations before England got around to it. Which means an Irish surname is not a label; it is a thousand-year-old…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
Irish Genealogy Glossary: Key Terms Explained
Irish genealogy speaks three languages at once — administrative English, register Latin, and anglicised Irish — and half of every beginner’s confusion is vocabulary. This glossary translates the lot. Bookmark it, and come back whenever a record says something strange. Terms are grouped by where…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 15, 2026
Irish Emigration Records: Ships, Ports, and Passenger Lists
Between the Famine and the founding of the Free State, Ireland exported people on a scale no European nation has matched — millions of departures, most of them one-way. The paradox for researchers: the country they left kept almost no record of their going. The…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 14, 2026
The 1922 Records Fire: What Was Lost and What Survived
On 30 June 1922, in the opening days of the Irish Civil War, the Public Record Office at the Four Courts burned — and with it, seven centuries of Ireland’s documented memory. It is the disaster every Irish researcher has heard of, usually in the…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 14, 2026
How to Find Your Ancestor’s Townland in Ireland
“County Cork” is not an address. It is half a million ancestors deep and eighty miles wide — and it is what most families remember. The townland is the address: one of Ireland’s sixty-one thousand small named places, and the single most valuable fact in…
Written by: Irish Roots Project Editorial Team
Posted on: June 14, 2026
Griffith’s Valuation: Ireland’s Census Substitute Explained
Ireland’s nineteenth-century censuses are ash — but between 1847 and 1864, a tax survey wrote down the name of nearly every household head in the country, townland by townland. Richard Griffith was valuing property; he accidentally built the census substitute an entire research tradition now…