Kerry landlords for over 700 years, up to the land Acts of the late 1890s, ruled the lives of our Kerry ancestors. From the Fitgerald/Fitzmaurice Normans arrival, through the Plantation of Munster and the Cromwellian re-conquest, landlords, their middlemen and agents, were the major influence on day to day life for the vast majority of […]
John Grenham’s blog of Oct 22nd, titled We’re a post-imperial rounding error was so true, so incisive that I urge you to log on and read it in its entirety. In our day-to-day dealings in the genealogy world, we are often asked by Irish descendants ‘what is going on’? Why do the British want to leave the […]
Yesterday we visited Killarney for a walk. This time we choose the Fossa Way which starts just inside the gate of Killarney National Park (Knockreer Estate entrance). A notice at the gate alerted us to the Deer Rut which happens in the Park at this time every year. This walk is a loop walk with […]
This is the story of mass emigration from the Iveragh Peninsula in 1883. Two ships were chartered and assisted passage was provided to take entire families away from South Kerry to New York in this case. 1,200 in total left. ‘There were 253 pupils in the Ballyhearney National School before the 2nd ship sailed. The […]
The enumeration of emigrants from Irish Ports did not start until 1st May 1851. From that time onward to 1906, we have a list of the numbers leaving the country, unfortunately neither their names, the ports they left from nor their destinations have been included. The figures below show that 113,237 males and 113,827 females, […]
If your ancestor sailed from Blennerville, the Port of Tralee in May 1857, you will be glad to know that he/she was of ‘superior class’. That is according to the Kerry Evening Post. The paper goes on to tell us that a ‘dozen fine young peasants‘ left for Melbourne – apologies to Australian descendants for […]
I get a lot of email queries asking about different branches of the O’Sullivan (Sullivan) families in Kerry. See an earlier blog with an overall summary. To-day I have a first hand account of a number of the O’Sullivan branch names from the Kilgarvan area and their home locations from Sean O’Sullivan of Tuosist The […]
‘Fake News’ , ‘alternative facts’, conflicting genealogical evidence, whatever title you use, how do you apply it when researching your Kerry ancestors? In other words, what ‘facts’ can you believe in? Just because you are on a certain genealogy website, and you find a name exactly or similar to your ancestor who lived at […]
Did your Kerry Ancestor pawn a coat, own a wandering pig, or ‘commit a breach of the Sabbath’? While Genealogy in its purest form is defined in the English Dictionary as ‘a line of descent of a person or family from earliest known ancestor’, my training in Family History and Genealogy goes much further. We […]
Conducting research into the papers of Francis Thomas Fitzmaurice 3rd Earl of Kerry in the French National Archivees is not an easy job. The actual volume of material, the overheated reading room, the identification of the French receipts all took their toll. My son Marc and I spent a number of days last week examining […]
Kay Caball is a qualified Genealogist certified by the University of Limerick. A native of Kerry, Kay specialises in Kerry based local family history and genealogy. She studied History of the Family & Genealogical Methods at the University of Limerick with her research conducted in primary and secondary sources for the County of Kerry.
Kay is also a member of the Eneclann & Ancestor Network panel of genealogy advisers at the National Library of Ireland.
