While I was greeting a new member of WikiTree this morning, I wondered how knowledge of the Irish language might influence or inspire one's genealogical research. I also wondered if the reverse is true - how many folks are inspired to study Irish while researching their ancestors?

I'd welcome guest posts at this link, and of course responses here on ILF would give me some insight. Go raibh maith agaibh!
(Right - feel free to comment on whether an exclamation mark belongs there...)

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/358599/an- ... peak-irish

Karen in Colorado, USA

For myself I've gotten a bit of exposure to the language through my enthusiasm for Irish set dancing. A local Irish teacher Noel Mullan was a fellow dancer, and we would often find the Daltaí na Gaeilge gang attending the same local festivals. In the late 1990s I once shared a taxi in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a fellow who was tutoring President Mary Robinson in the language. I remember he interrupted the (ahem!) "manly stories" he was swapping with our cabmate to ensure that my answer to "Do you have any Irish?" was a no.

Haigh, Karen.

I began studying Irish in 1974 (I know, a long time ago), but have been very inconsistent. I do have a great interest in genealogy, and what I have in my family is quite extensive, but most of the Irish ancestry I've uncovered so far is in the north (County Antrim) so I am unsure of how useful Irish would be in searching records in that area, at least during the last 300 years or so. I am hoping to find records of relations in the south, and I have a couple of names that seem possible, such as Malone, but so far I've only traced them to England.

My interest in the language, per se, was unrelated to any kind of research, but it may (hopefully) come in handy some day when I do make that elusive connection with the Irish speaking relations that must be out there. According to Ancestry DNA (my youngest sister's test), we are 25% Irish, which is not an insignificant degree of relations, but much of my father's immediate ancestry came from Wales. We are not sure where the lines of relationships are drawn or blurred in this respect in the British Isles, so for now, I am content to hope to find a connection that will allow me to use what I have learned to advance the knowledge of our family tree.

Dale D
Woodland, California, USA

I'm also a genealogy buff, and also in California. I've traced each line in my family back to about 1800 (some a bit earlier), 7 out of 8 great-grandparents (and two grandparents) being born in Ireland. I have extensive family trees set up on the Family Search and Geni sites. I've joined WikiTree and posted some name searches there, but haven't had time to put the family tree info there. They really should all coordinate that aspect, as Family Search and Ancestry are planning to do in the near future, so that one can transfer a family tree from one to the other.

I had two grandparents who were raised speaking Irish at home, and I use Irish in the family trees by creating fields where I explain the Irish-language origins of the surnames and also the names of the counties, parishes, and townlands where our family lived, which people have found very interesting (we have townland names which translate, for example, as "quarter [of land] of the fairy hill" and "quarter [of land] of thistles").

There are almost no vital statistics records actually in Irish, apart from names of people and places, and they are almost always anglicized to at least some extent, but sometimes Irish leaks through in parish registers. The records may be in English or Latin (or pseudo-Latin), and one gets used to someone being baptized as Dionysius who was actually a Denis (or a Donncha), or the fact that the huge number of Cornelius's in some areas were mostly Conor's in their everyday lives, but in a few cases I've inferred that the priest may not have been fluent in English, or totally familiar with anglicized names. In one case a priest misspelled a number of anglicized names, such as rendering the name Sarah as Saragh, which seemed an inadvertent confusion with the Irish name Sorcha (frequently anglicized as Sarah).

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.