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John Grenham’s Tracing Your Irish Ancestors is arguably the best book ever written on Irish genealogy. Not since Margaret Falley’s Irish and Scotch-Irish Ancestral Research, written in the early 1960s, has there been a book that combines all the best features of a textbook and a reference book, expertly describing the various steps in the research process while at the same time providing an indispensable body of source materials for immediate use.

With its step-by-step instructions in the location and use of genealogical records, its discussion of civil records of birth, marriage, and death, along with land records and wills, and its list of Roman Catholic parish records and county source lists, it is easily the most useful book in Irish genealogy.

Now, updated to reflect the enormous changes brought about by the Internet, the new Third Edition of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors marks another huge step forward in Irish genealogy. Most importantly, a chapter has been added that deals specifically with the Internet, while a new online subsection showing county Internet sources has been added to each of the county source lists and, where possible, references have been given throughout for any online versions of the records dealt with.

In addition, in this new Third Edition the Roman Catholic parish maps have been completely revised and redrawn, a guide to variant parish names has been supplied, and the reference section has been greatly enlarged.

Nearly a third of the book is occupied by an exhaustive county-by-county listing of genealogical source records, including census returns and substitutes, Internet sources, local history publications, local journals, gravestone inscriptions, estate records, and place names, with hardly a record left unmentioned except for Catholic church records, enumerated in the final section of the book.

This last section is an extensive list of copies of all known Roman Catholic records that can be found in the National Library of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the LDS Family History Library, and in local Irish Heritage Centers. County-by-county and parish by parish this list gives the dates, locations, and formats of all existing copies of baptism, marriage, and burial records. Keyed to parish and county maps, this is one of the most important finding aids available to the genealogist.