The first county we cover
County Mayo
Mayo is where this starts. It is one of the counties that lost the most people to emigration, which is why so many people tracing an Irish family end up here, and why the records, the centres and the ground itself are worth getting right before anything else.
What you can do here
Find out where you actually are
Five questions, and a stage with the reason attached. Not a score, and not a sales funnel.
Get the next step, not every step
What is worth doing from where you are standing, in the order it is worth doing it.
See who can help with that step
Where we have checked them. Where we have not, you get told that instead.
How the journey actually runs
There are five stages, and they are about evidence rather than effort. Which one you are on decides what is worth doing next, and it changes what we will and will not put in front of you.
- Irish connection
“I know my family was Irish.”
- First clue
“I have a surname, a family story or a DNA result — but no place in Ireland.”
- County identified
“I think I know the county.”
- Parish or locality identified
“I know the parish.”
- Ancestral place identified
“I can point at the place on a map.”
Wanting to visit is not a sixth stage. It is a separate thing about you, and it never changes your research stage: if you can point at the place and have no intention of going, you are still at the top of the ladder and everything research-shaped stays exactly where it was.
Why your stage changes the answer
A county genealogy centre is the right answer once you have a county, and the wrong answer before that, because there is nothing yet for them to search. A guide who takes people to a townland is the right answer once you know the townland, and cannot help before it. Recommending everything to everybody is how a directory wastes your time and somebody else’s money, so we do not.
How things get listed
Nothing on this site is a paid placement. No listing has been sold, no organisation has paid to appear or to appear higher, and there is no advertising on these pages. What we show you is decided by whether an organisation fits your situation and whether we have checked the facts we would be relying on. If we have not checked something, we leave it out rather than repeat it.
How many people we list in Mayo today
None yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise
Organisations only appear here once the facts a recommendation would rest on have been checked against what that organisation itself publishes. That work is under way in Mayo and none of it has finished. Until it does, this site gives you your stage, the reason for it and the next useful step, and it tells you plainly where it has nobody to name.
That is a real answer. A list padded with organisations nobody has checked would be worse than a short one, and it is the failure this whole site is built to avoid.