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Co. Longford Families - MOFFATT & Others

Tracking Co. Longford Families

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If you have tracked your family to Co. Longford in central Ireland, this site may give you some ways to further your research.

The website has a wide array of records particular to MOFFATT families in County Longford, along with allied families. But this site also has parish maps along with leads on tracking down other records that may lead you to finding records of other families.

Co. Longford has an amazing wealth of resources, as you will see on the pages of this site. Whoever said Ireland had few records had not looked at Co. Longford. Many Church of Ireland registers survive, along with land records, Catholic Church records, tithe applotment & Griffiths Valuation tax records, land lease records, and even two versions of a 1790 Voters List! In addition LINKS to other sites of interest will give you further directions for exploration.

Take your time, come back to explore what is available on the website, and poke into corners to gain hints for your own research. And certainly feel free to ask questions of me, via email at tmoffatt-at-xplornet-dot-com.

 

What kinds of maps are useful?

While virtually any good map with sufficient detail can be useful, start off by locating maps of Co. Longford that show the parishes, the baronies, and the poor law union boundaries. Then see if you can find for the parishes of interest a map showing the townland boundaries. A great source of a map showing townland boundaries is the index map in David Leahy's Book Survivors of the Great Famine in Co. Longford. Whether or not you find all the above, you do need the modern 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey Maps for the area of Co. Longford of interest. Lastly, one should track down some form of the Victorian six inch to the mile maps. These can be downloaded from the subscription site Irish Origins. These particular maps are marvellous in that they have notations on land parcels that relate to those in the 1854 Griffith's Valuation. This may be a date after migration, but the land parcels still help sort out where family members lived. In late Spring 2011 Ancestry.com has added copies of the 6in. maps, but for better or worse they are the earliest versions, and without the land notations associated with the Griffiths Valuation. Note that ancestry.com also has the tithe applotments and Griffiths Valuations searchable. Unfortunately the tithe applotment listings are imperfect - So Rymsza's book is preferred.

 

What basic info do I need?

Location is everything! It is great when you know a family's parish and even townland, as everything else is likely to fall into place. However, depending on how common the name, you may be able to solve your research problems only knowing they came from Co. Longford - or even just suspecting it. The best resources for most with families who moved to England, North America, or Australia/New Zealand or South Africa are the tithe applotment lists compiled, depending on parish, in the 1820s and 1830s. Co. Longford is fortunate in having them in a compiled transcription available in book form - County Longford, Residents Prior to the Famine, by Guy Rymsza. This book is increasingly a challenge to find - but a disc version is available via Amazon's Marketplace from the author, but note that it works with PCs only, not Macs. This book/cd-rom can unlock the key to your research.

 
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Longford Research Hints

When you are stuck on the origins of a family that emigrated from Ireland, look for other families that intermarried or were close neighbours during the first years after they arrived in their new land. Then research the origin of that other family. Very commonly they were from the same or a nearby parish, and within the same county.

website longford.ca / More Information on Co. Longford Families Tom Moffatt