Jayne McGarvey Genealogy

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Jayne McGarvey Genealogy

Jayne McGarvey provides a professional genealogy service for people with ancestors from Northern Ire

Genealogy in Northern Ireland

Maybe you are considering exploring your Northern Irish roots for the first time, or want to investigate your family history further but don’t have the time to look. Or you’re just not in the right location to pursue your genealogy project or search a particular set of Records, Will or Graveyard. Perhaps you have lost a family member in a census or can’t find that el

usive wedding. Knowing about our ancestors can provide a sense of identity in a changing world, and many of us yearn to know more about the people who made us who we are. Yet all too often we know precious little beyond our own grandparents. What part of the country were your ancestors from and what was their place in society? Irish genealogy has somewhat of a reputation for being a disappointing and frustrating pastime for amateur family historians. Countless stories have emerged of people hitting dead ends and the dreaded brick wall, or you will have been told that all the records were lost in the 1922 Four Courts fire in Dublin and indeed many records, but not all, were lost. Each family has its own story just waiting to be uncovered, and it’s a real privilege to help someone find out about their past. If you are ready to embark on your voyage of discovery then contact me today, and take your first step towards knowing your ancestors. My Services

Initial Ancestral Research Assessment

An Initial Ancestral Research Assessment explores the feasibility of archival research by identifying sources of potential relevance for your family history in Northern Ireland. It is often a good idea to commission only a couple of hours to begin with. This will facilitate some work to be done and for a research plan to be drawn up based on results, the information you have and the survival of NI genealogy records which appear relevant. This can also be a useful starting point if you wish to undertake some or all of your own research. An initial research assessment costs £30 and on average takes 3–4 weeks to complete. Detailed Research Packages

A Detailed Research Package can be tailored to suit your individual requirements, whether you wish to build up an individual profile of an ancestor or search a particular family line (which can include extended family members if you wish) or search an individual set of records. This may include archives held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), The General Registration Office, (GRONI) or it may be more locally at churches, graveyards, libraries, newspaper offices etc. This can be useful for clients who wish to carry out the majority of their own research but for time/geographical reasons are unable to search an individual set of parish records or visit a particular grave yard. A Detailed Research Package costs £35.00 per 2 hour block commissioned and includes travel to Central Belfast Archives. Travel to other non-centrally held repositories or areas can be quoted for upon request. Please note that postage charges and fees imposed by registry offices / archives for certificates and photocopying will be added to these time charges. These will be agreed with the client before research commences. Photography

If feasible would you like photographs of homesteads, townlands, churches, schools, headstones? (These can be priced individually or as a package dependent on distance, and can be provided as hard copy and/or digital image)

Please email me for a quotation

Document Retrieval

Know what you want, and where it is, just want a copy by email or post

Please email me for a quotation

21/08/2026

Did your ancestors use a (or several) different spellings for their surname?

Share the differences you have found.

19/08/2026

Does your family react like this?

16/08/2026

Boiled potatoes weren't merely with dinner in many an Irish household — they were dinner, with everything else playing a supporting role. Large families were common in rural Ireland, and a mother's day often revolved around stretching what the land gave to feed everyone at the table. Potatoes remained the staple long after the Famine years, and the number of mouths to feed shows up in the historical record in ways researchers can trace: household returns in the 1901 and 1911 censuses list every child by name and age, often revealing families of eight, ten, or more crowded into a few rooms.

If your ancestors had a big family, those census returns are worth a close look — later-born children sometimes appear on one census and not the other, and birth order can hint at gaps caused by infant loss.

14/08/2026

Tempting - but not advisable!

12/08/2026

Life above the shop counter was the norm rather than the exception in Irish market towns, and it produced a particular kind of family history record trail.

Shopkeepers, tailors, and merchants rarely just worked their premises; they lived in the rooms above them, which meant the whole family appears bundled into the same address in census returns and valuation records. Handy for genealogists, less handy for a shopkeeper's wife trying to get the children to bed while a delivery cart rattles past the window at all hours.

Trade directories are one of the best ways to trace these families, especially when they vanish from other records. Pigot's Directory covers Ireland from the 1820s, Slater's from 1846 onward, and Bassett's for specific counties from the 1880s. These list who traded where, year by year, and can help pin down exactly when a family took over premises or gave them up.

Local newspapers are another underused source. Provincial papers were carrying trade advertisements from the early 1800s, and a grocer or draper announcing new stock, a change of premises, or even a small dispute with a supplier can turn up in print long before official records catch up. Findmypast and the British Newspaper Archive both hold digitised runs worth searching.

Did your family run a shop, pub, or trade premises in a market town, in counties such as Antrim or Roscommon, or anywhere else on the island? I would love to hear which trade it was and where it was.

PS - Is anybody planning to watch the solar eclipse tonight?

09/08/2026

Home from School

There's a particular kind of tiredness in children walking home from the national school — slates and readers tucked under arm, boots scuffed from the boreen, the day's lessons already fading in favour of whatever's for tea. In many rural households in the early 1900s, they'd have come home to find their mother still at work: the spinning wheel didn't keep school hours, and neither did the household economy that depended on it.

By this period, home spinning was on the wane in most of Ireland, pushed out by mill-spun yarn, but it lingered on in pockets — particularly through Ulster's linen districts, where a woman turning wool or flax at her own door was still supplementing whatever the farm brought in. It's a reminder that a household's income rarely came from one source, and rarely from the father's occupation alone, whatever the census return might suggest.

For the children: national school registers can be genuinely rewarding when they survive — often recording a child's age, religion, attendance, and the father's occupation and townland, which can help pin down a family between census years. For the 26 counties of Ireland, Findmypast holds a good selection of digitised registers for this period. For the six counties now in Northern Ireland, PRONI holds surviving records in physical format in the archives. Dates and survival rates differ from school to school.

Was there a national school in your family's townland, and do you know whether the women in that household were bringing in income through spinning, weaving, or lace work that never made it into any official record? I'd love to hear whether your research has turned up a school register in County Mayo, or a spinning wheel remembered in a farmhouse in County Down.

07/08/2026

Are you at a loss for where to find any of the Collections previously available on https://genealogy.nationalarchives.ie/ ?
If so most are available on a mix of FamilySearch, Ancestry and Findmypast.

If anyone would like the list in Word.docx format message me and I'll send you the page.
Jayne

05/08/2026

Every village in Ireland once had one - the premises that sold you a stamp, a pound of sugar, and a pint, sometimes measured you for a suit into the bargain.

The pattern grew out of the mid-nineteenth century temperance movement. As the drink trade came under increasing scrutiny, publicans diversified into groceries and general provisions to keep the business viable, creating what the trade directories of the day called the "spirit grocery". The post office element came later and separately, as the Post Office franchised local receiving offices to trusted shopkeepers from the 1840s onward, so the shop counter that already sold flour and candles often gained a set of scales for parcels and a ledger for money orders as well. By the later Victorian period, it was entirely ordinary to find one building serving as pub, grocer, draper, hardware merchant and post office, with the same family running the lot for generations.

Most of these all-in-one premises did not survive the twentieth century. Supermarkets drew away the grocery trade from the 1960s onward, licensing law gradually separated retail from drink sales, and An Post's repeated rounds of rural office closures have stripped the postal side from almost all that remained. A number of pub-and-grocery pairings do still trade much as they always did, counter and bar under the same roof, though the post office function attached to them has, in the great majority of cases, gone the way of the messenger boy's bicycle.

If an ancestor kept one of these premises, the business itself can be a research route in its own right. Trade directories such as Slater's or Pigot's will often list a named shopkeeper by trade and townland well before civil registration begins, and Griffith's Valuation can confirm the rateable premises where they held it as owner or lessee. Local newspaper notices are worth searching for licence transfers, deaths of the proprietor, or a business changing hands, all of which tend to be reported.

Did your family run a shop, pub or post office in their village, whether in Cavan or Down, Kerry or Fermanagh? We would love to hear where.

02/08/2026

There's a particular kind of walk every family historian knows well: the one where you're wandering an old street and half-expecting to meet the people in the photographs.

That's really what research does, in the end. You start with a name and a date, and if you're patient, you end up walking the same cobbles they walked, past the same shopfronts, wondering if they nodded to the neighbours the way you're nodding to strangers now. The street survives long after the people who filled it are gone, and it's often the only witness left.

Have you ever stood on a street your ancestors lived or worked on? Tell us the town, and whether it still looks anything like it did.

31/07/2026

Every townland has a pair like this — still out walking the same lane fifty years on, still holding hands, and still moving at the pace dictated by whoever's carrying the basket.

Marriage records rarely tell you any of this. A parish register gives you a date and two names; it says nothing about the stick that's really there for emphasis during arguments, or the daily circuit past the same gate for half a century. If you want the real story of a marriage, you generally have to go looking well beyond the certificate — newspaper notices, valuation records showing who held the house between them, the odd unflattering remark in a neighbour's letter.

Did your grandparents have a regular walk, a gate they always stopped at, or a lane that was "theirs"? Tell us the townland.

Address

39 Ballyknockan Road, Ballygowan
Newtownards
BT236NR

Telephone

+442897528750

Website

http://www.jaynemcgarvey.com/

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