... including McBride, Callaghan, Sweeney, McCarry and other ancestral families
This is a development area of my website that I use for creating basic family trees. At present, I am using it for the Shields, McBride and connected families; my daughter Rachel is married to David, son of Michael and Margaret (McBride) Shields The tree will eventually get moved to a site of its own or be transferred to one of the genealogy sites.
As it is a development area, some of the functionality may not be working properly. Also, some of the photos shown are from a standard template and are not related to the Shields family.
The site is private at present. If you want access or have any questions about the site, please contact me using the link below or by email to martinharran@gmail.com explaining who you are.
The site contains a wide range of information, but most of it is reasonably intuitive, so dive in and explore! The easiest way to get started is to click on either the 'Shields Side' or 'McBride Side' links at the top right; these take you respectively to the ancestral trees for Michael and Margaret (McBride) Shields of Milford.
From there you can click on any of their ancestors to get that person's information page. Just be careful to click on the person's name, not their photo. If you do click on their photo, that will take you to a page with a larger copy of the photo but you will get a link to their details page below the photo (the 'Linked to' box at the bottom, not the title of the photo). You can zoom in and out of the page using the magnifying glass icons; if you click and hold on a blank area, you can drag the chart about to see more of it.
If you end up on a group photo and hover over the faces, you may see face tags for some of the individuals; clicking on that will take you to their information page.
A person's details page is divided into various sections which are self explanatory. Within each section, there are links to other pages; for example, clicking on a parent’s name will take you to their details page; clicking on a photo or document will take you to that photo or document. You may see a magnifying glass beside various locations for births, marriages, deaths etc.; clicking on that will take you to a map showing that location.
On each page you got to, you will see a set of tabs along the top e.g. an individual's details page will have Individual, Ancestors, Descendants, etc. When you select a tab, you will see various options below the tab title for viewing information. The best way to get to know these is simply to explore them!
If you would like to see a tutorial, I have put one up on YouTube; it is 14 minutes long and is based on my own family website but it works the same way as this site.
Tutorial on YouTubeThe easiest way to search for a person is the link in the main menubar at the top of each page. Just enter a first name and/or a surname. It is best to leave the Broad Search box ticked as this will search for nicknames and maiden names e.g. searching for Gracie Shields will find her as Gracie Callaghan, her maiden name.
Where there are a number of people who meet the search criteria, a list of them will be given. You can usually figure out the one you want from either the profile thumbnail or one of the dates where given.
If the search does not give you the result you want, try variations on the name spelling. This search is fairly good at finding name variations as explained elsewhere on this page, but may not always succeed. Also, it may not always find a nickname/maiden name combination. There is also an advanced search available where you filter the results you want but I very rarely find the need to use that, the basic search is usually good enough.
If you just want to browse through the tree rather than looking for a specific person, there are various options on the menubar e.g. Find, Media, and Info, though not all of these are populated at this stage e.g. there is no DNA information on the site.
You can also click on the surname cloud at the bottom of this page to find all people with that surname; the size of a name in the cloud is proportional to the number of people with that name.
Finally, please take into consideration that this is a development site and not everything will work properly! There may also be changes from time to time, especially as I find new family information. There is a “What’s New” page which lists changes made in the last 30 days, but that is only for information about people, it does not pick up changes to the design of the site.I welcome all feedback, whether it be corrections to information on the site, errors found, something not working, additional information or suggestions on how the site could be improved; please don’t hesitate to use the Contact Form to let me know.
Most important of the lot – enjoy and have fun!
Where I given a full date of birth, that is because I have found a birth registration or baptismal record. Dates of birth on registrations, however, are not always totally reliable. This was due to families in rural Ireland not bothering to register the birth of a child until they were going to the town where the district registry office was located. If too long a period had elapsed since the child's birth, the parents were liable to be fined. To avoid this they simply made up a recent birth date to avoid the fine!
In some cases, I have found a baptismal record with a date before the birth registration. In these cases, although the baptismal record is probably more accurate, I have stayed with the official birth register as that is the one most likely to be used by anyone else researching family history and, in most cases the year is usually right and that is what most searching is done on.
Where I haven’t been able to find a birth registration or baptismal cert, I have tried to work out the year of birth from census forms or death certs but there are many discrepancies in this. I think that People often didn’t know their ages and just guessed them.
For example, in the 1901 census Bridget Kerr’s age is given as 44; in the 1911 census, i.e. 10 years later her age is 57! Her marriage cert in 1863 gives her age as 23 and her death cert (1940) gives her age as 80 so I’ve gone with 1860 which ties in with both of those
There is quite a bit of variation in name spelling on official records for births, marriages and deaths. There are several reasons for this. The principal one is that up until well into the 20th century, most people were uneducated and unable to read or write so they were declaring the names orally to the registrar who spelled them as they thought best. Added to this, especially in Donegal, was that most people spoke Irish; all records were in English so the registrar had to figure out the Irish name and the appropriate English version.
Much the same problems applied to place names plus the fact that locals often called an area by a different name from that on official records. In terms of names, I have generally gone with a single spelling, the one most commonly used.One exception to this is the Shields name; the original family name is Shiels though as commonly happens, that is spelled in various ways on old birth certificates – mostly Shiels, sometimes Sheils and even Shales!
John Shields (b 1892) added a ‘d’ to the name when he went to Scotland in the early 20th century as he had been told that doing so would make it easier to find work - the Catholic/Protestant divide was as bad in some parts of Scotland as it was in Northern Ireland!
I have used Shields for John and his descendants, Shiels for everyone else.
In times gone past, people quite often registered a birth with a short version of a first name, e.g. Mick instead of Michael. I have generally used the name on the birth cert with the short version as a nickname (appears in quote marks), or, if I don't have one, the first name the person was commonly known by.
The search function is fairly good at finding name variations but if a search does not find the person you are looking for, it may be worth trying a different spelling
I am more than happy to share information on this site with any other family member doing research. Please Contact Me to get GED files, photo originals and so on.
