Susan Field - Genealogist

Susan Field - Genealogist Genealogical research assistance with a cyber sleuth.

08/10/2026
07/21/2026

I love this. Her greatest creation is her children and she is mourning leaving them.

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06/30/2026

TEACHING TUESDAY - WHAT IS A CENOTAPH?
A cenotaph is a grave marker for an empty grave. It's that simple. The person may be interred or inurned somewhere else or have some other final disposition. If they have some other final disposition that falls under "Not buried in a cemetery?" then their only memorial would be the cenotaph (and any monument or other cenotaph they may have).
IF the person has a memorial where they are actually located, then all Family Links would be attached to that memorial. If they only have a cenotaph (or a cenotaph and a monument), then the Family Links would belong on the cenotaph.
If a person has a cenotaph and a memorial, they can be linked to each other using the html feature in the Bio section.
When creating or editing a memorial, to mark it as a cenotaph, on the Edit or Create screen, you will see other options as you scroll down under Gravesite Details. Open 'Additional grave marker options.' Label the memorial as a Cenotaph by using the toggle switch.

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06/29/2026

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The names stop in 1847. So many stop in 1847.

Every Irish genealogist hits the same wall. The records run back through the 19th century with reasonable confidence, the census entries, the ship manifests, the baptismal registers, the gravestones, and then somewhere in the late 1840s the trail goes cold. Not because the people stopped existing but because the systems that recorded them collapsed simultaneously. The census records destroyed in the 1922 fire. The parish registers incomplete or missing for the Famine years. The people themselves scattered so completely that the threads connecting them to specific townlands were cut and never fully retied. The family tree that is detailed on the left and dissolves into question marks on the right is not a failure of research. It is an accurate map of what the Famine did to the documentary record of Irish family life.

What drives the woman at the table in Portland to keep going is a refusal to accept that the names are simply gone. They are not gone. The Griffith's Valuation land survey of 1847 to 1864 captured nearly every household in Ireland and is fully searchable online. The Tithe Applotment Books of the 1820s and 1830s predate the Famine and record the names of landholders across every parish. Diocesan archives often hold registers that the parish copies did not survive. The civil registration system that began in 1864 can frequently be worked backward from children's birth records to locate parents who appear nowhere else. The 1847 wall is real. It is not absolute. It is a research problem, not a dead end, and the woman at the table in Portland with her red pen and her Clare map and her two-hour cold coffee understands that distinction completely. Drop the county where your family tree hits the wall in the comments. And follow The Irish Remembered. ☘️

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