A Guide to Tracing your Cork Ancestors

The Irish Times website has a very useful genealogy section, the url is: www.irishtimes.ie/ancestor. Click ‘civil parish survey’ to go to an interactive map of Ireland; click County Cork to go to a three-part map of the county, similar to the maps in this chapter. You can then click a civil parish to get a full list of all of the townlands and streets within the parish. At that point, you also get a ‘summary of sources covering’ the civil parish. To get the full details of the sources, you are invited to make an online payment of €12.50.

Another useful source that can be consulted at this stage is Casey’s fifteen volume compilation O’Kief Coshe Mang etc., mainly dealing with North Cork, but also including general material relating to the entire county and adjacent areas (see page 126). These volumes are widely available in larger libraries with an Irish studies collection. (The Albert E. Casey collection of Irish materials is housed in Samford University special collections Harwell G. Davis Library, Birmingham Alabama 35209.)

Source material for two emigration schemes to North America from County Cork merits mention, even though it represents only a minute fraction of total emigration. In 1823 and 1825, Peter Robinson supervised the emigration of over 2,500 people, mostly drawn from the Blackwater Valley in North Cork, to Upper Canada (now Ontario). The primary sources for what is known as the Robinson Settlements are the Peter Robinson papers, which are in Peterborough Public Library, Ontario. A microfilm copy of these papers is held by Cork County Library, which also holds a microfilm copy of H. T. Pammett’s MA thesis (1934) on the Robinson emigration. Further detail on the Robinson Settlements may be found in the following articles: Christy Roche, ‘Mallow and the Robinson Settlements’ in Mallow Field Club Journal, No. 8, 1990; and F. T. Frankling, ‘Brief Background for Robinson Settlements’, in Mallow Field Club Journal, No. 12, 1994.