On the Road with Reid 'Round Ireland: Digging for Your Irish Roots (cont'd)

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Need more guidance in the geneaology department? There's no shortage of books on the market to help you track down the deeper roots of your family tree

The Search
There are two main ways to conduct research into a family tree if you aren't lucky enough to have all the fact, dates, and details—or a relative who knows them—close at hand. The first is the long, often torturous, academic method of combing through public records and on-line databases, matching names and dates and vaguely remembered home towns and scraps of official documents like birth and death certificates and Ellis Island immigration forms. This you can do, often to a great degree, on your own if you have the time, luck, proper leads, and happen to run across a few helpful librarians or clerks.

The other route is to take whatever data you already possess and turn it all over to a genealogical research service or professional who will do the leg work for you for a fee, which can range anywhere from a flat $25 to $25 an hour, or perhaps $350 for a full family tree work-up. Though using one of these may seem a bit like cheating—and certainly against the Budget Travel ethos in terms of cost—the benefits can be enormous.

Unless you have impeccable and detailed records of the family tree already, and/or get really lucky, the search can take you a massive amount of time, much of it spent wandering blindly down the wrong research paths or (ahem) barking up the wrong family tree. Paid genealogists have the benefit not only of access to all the databases they may need, but also the expertise in knowing just where to look for the information, and how to plug those names and dates you provide into the right search to pop up a match.

They're also more familiar with the esoterica of such a search, such that, for example, immigration papers that peg a new arrival as "from Cork" may just mean that the ship your great-grandma sailed over on left from Cork. (That one holds for most countries; many Italian-Americans believe their ancestors came from Naples or Palermo when in a high percentage of cases those major port cities were just where grandpa Mario caught the boat bound for Brooklyn.)

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