Family and Local History
[Bill Macafee's Website]

Localities

As I said in the paper Researching Families and Localities, more people, particularly those from outside Northern Ireland, are interested in finding out what the locality in which their ancestors lived was like at various times in the past and exactly where their ancestors lived within a townland or street.

Because of this, and by way of example, I have put together a number of sources relating to the localities listed below. The sources presented for all of the localities have been selected because they not only provide information on what the locality was like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also because they provide the names of the persons living in each locality at various times. Often family names, and the properties in which they lived, can be located precisely within a townland or street. Furthermore, these properties and the persons living in them can be matched across documents from at least the Griffith's Valuation of c.1860, and its subsequent revisions, to the Census Records of 1901 and 1911 - read more. When combined with civil and church records, this process would enable anyone searching for their ancestors in these localities to identify exactly where they lived in the past. Maps are a key feature of these locality studies - you might find this paper, Some Notes on Ordnance Survey and Valuation Map, 1830s to 1950s and these index maps for Co. Londonderry and North & Mid Antrim useful.