Roots Television | Megan's Roots World

Do you have any ancestors who hail from Northern Ireland? I do, and it's been a bit of a hassle. I have quite a few family details about my great-grandprents, David Shields and Margaret (McKaig) Shields, from Northern Ireland, but three rounds of research by professional genealogists there have yielded nothing. But now there's hope.

Recently launched Emerald Ancestors focuses specifically on Northern Ireland. According to the website:

"Emerald Ancestors provides instant access to one of the largest collections of Irish genealogy records available, as well as a range of rare Irish history book reprints. We specialise in Irish Ancestry within Northern Ireland and our extensive database contains birth, marriage, death, and census records for over 1 million Ancestors in Counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone."

It's one of those deals where you can search for free, but have to pay to get full results. I have a bad habit, so I couldn't resist subscribing (which you can do for a month or a year).

After playing with the database, I have plenty of leads to pursue -- assorted Shields and McKaigs in the right place at the right time. But the site does not give you digitized images. Rather, it provides basic names, dates and places from the documents. You can request a full transcript of an actual document (which will be emailed to you), but an extra fee is involved.I'm not quite ready to try that out yet, but will blog about it when I do.

Be sure to use the "Ancestry Search" option (see the menu at top) to deal with common names since this is essentially the site's advanced search. Otherwise, you can find yourself wading through far too many candidates.

In a dream world, I'd like this site to have more records and digitized versions, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. If you've got Northern Irish roots, you know that there's been a surprising dearth of indexes available for this area, so Emerald Ancestors is a nice step in the right direction -- and I plan on keeping an eye on it. It can only become more useful over time!