Irish Roots: Get advice from genealogists

Genealogists are shy creatures, prone to looking fragile and dazed if exposed to daylight or lots of (living) people at the same time. Tell me you’ve seen a bunch of genealogists singing a come-all-ye and I’ll ask you what hallucinogen you are using.

All the more remarkable then, that Back to our Past, the annual genealogists’ jamboree, is now five years old and growing every year. We’re clearly getting better at going outdoors.

The organisers originally offset some of the risk of the venture by cleverly piggybacking on the much broader appeal of the Over 50s Show, and the two events still take place in tandem. But BTOP has now become a phenomenon in its own right, an indispensable showcase for libraries, archives, websites, professionals, publishers and societies.

As well as offering a market for anyone involved in the supply side of genealogy, the show provides some excellent free services to attract the public. This year there are two separate strands of free lectures, spanning the full gamut from the sublime –David Butler’s “Irish Landlords and the Merchant Classes during the Great Irish Famine” – to the other extreme, my own “What We lose when Records are Digitised”.

A simultaneous series of free talks sponsored by Family Tree DNA and ISOGG (the International Society of Genetic Genealogists) make up the Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2014 conference and will give a firm grounding in the genealogical uses of DNA, as well as unveiling some of the most recent discoveries.

And for the fourth year in a row, the Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland is providing a free advisory service on all three days – you can book a slot at apgi.ie/consultationform.html The show takes place in the RDS Industries Hall in Dublin over next weekend, October 17th to 19th. More detail is at backtoourpast.com.

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