I wanted to add a positive review about the genealogy services and to counter some of the negative comments I've seen about what they offer.
I'm an amateur who has been continuing my great-grandmother's research into my family's genealogy for almost 10 years. Our Irish ancestors have been the most difficult to track down and verify, so my mom and I were thrilled to find this service before traveling to Ireland. I was a little nervous about the price after reading some of these negative reviews, but I'd like to say that the session was incredibly worth it, and we're glad we paid for 80 minutes. We opted for a zoom session.
I’ve seen other visitors complain about the center 'simply sitting you down in front of Ancestry' or searching certain family history websites. The thing is, these websites aren’t just research tools for laymen, they are databases that contain many vital records that experts know how to navigate better than the average enthusiast.
Our session did begin with our genealogist searching ancestry but it went so far beyond that. The genealogist we spoke with introduced us to additional resources I wouldn't have found on my own, with access to a variety of Irish records. She expertly cross-checked between multiple sources and was a wealth of knowledge on what records to specifically search for, based on when Ireland started recording births as well as baptisms, whether certain records were known to be destroyed, and so on. She also provided a very clear list of next steps we could take to try and discover more with the data we currently have. She emailed every single resource, link, and screenshots of any potentially helpful information she found, and made sure we knew where to go from there. She genuinely seemed to care.
She was able to decipher a mother's Irish surname we've been puzzling over for decades, that ended up being very rare. She was able to confirm that our family surnames were, indeed, common in the county we believed our immigrant ancestor came from. She was able to tell us which parish they likely belonged to. And, she told us where we could upload our ancestry DNA information to potentially find more matches in Ireland (and sent instructions)!
I’ve also seen other visitors complain that sessions felt like a ‘rip off’ because the genealogists weren’t able to help them. If you are looking into this experience expecting a guarantee, rather than support from an expert to enhance your chances of finding more information, then maybe you should forego genealogy services, because that’s not how they work.
It's important to know going in that if you don't have your ancestors' approximate birthdays and parents' names, they probably can't do much for you; research can only go so far. That isn’t the center’s fault, it’s the nature of genealogy. We came to the session with that information for one ancestor, but also another for whom we only knew the birth year and a potential mother's name. Our genealogist spent a lot of time on both and genuinely seemed to want to get concrete information for us. I really appreciated the thoroughness.
Yes, the session essentially consists of a genealogist searching records for you, but they have so much historical and practical expertise to search and cross-check in ways that the layman can't. We really enjoyed learning from her and even though our lack of surviving records meant we weren't able to make any huge discoveries, I learned so much that I can apply to my family history work moving forward. I'm excited to see if the next steps she gave us lead to anything new!!