By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR

If it’s Irish ancestry we seek, most of the information we find can be credited to John Grenham. 

Grenham, world-famous genealogist and author of eight Irish genealogy books, including the classic Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, started his career in 1981 as one of the panel of researchers in the Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland. He is a fellow of the Irish Genealogical Research Society and the Genealogical Society of Ireland. He wrote the Irish Roots column for the Irish Times newspaper and frequently features on the television show Who Do You Think You Are?

He enjoys such illustrious success, and yet, if you hear him tell it, his efforts were all in service of avoiding the drudgery that made his genealogy research famous. 

“It was like being a supermarket checkout assistant,” Grenham said in a 2021 interview, “except that it’s the same item of grocery passing in front of you six hours a day.” 

Working through the monotony of microfilm: surname, religion, country of origin, where the ancestors left from, their year of birth in Ireland, “It made me very motivated, shall we say. The first book, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, came into existence as a way for me to get away from the supermarket checkout reader.” 

The dawn of the computer put him on a new path altogether, one that led away from his copious paper notes. “A computer! With a computer at the base (of the research), I could do lists in ways I had only suspected. And a database, that was something special.”

Grenham came up with the idea of trying to automate much of the “drudge process,” as he called it. He designed a form that would automate the results from the standard inputs, and the new program went on sale in 1995, delivered on 25 floppy discs. “You had to be committed to it,” he laughed, “because it took more than a week to load it on a computer to even use.”  

That commitment to Irish ancestry research has only grown in the last few decades. Where Irish genealogic data was once thought lost among decaying villages, Ireland has risen to become a beacon for those seeking family records from there. And attitudes have shifted as well, as public services acknowledge the massive number of Irish descendants around the world who want to honor their roots and learn more.

Grenham greatly influenced the shift to make Irish records more accessible. He said when Tracing Your Irish Ancestry was first published in in 1992, “it felt like lighting a small candle in a large, very dark room.” With the extraordinary changes in access and effort to help Irish descendants unearth their relevant historical data, “the lights have now been turned on,” Grenham said. 

No one person has done more to collect a useful body of research tools in Irish genealogy than Grenham. You might have heard of his website, www.johngrenham.com, but if you’ve never used it yourself, you might not know that this database continues to grow even today. Grenham is a man obsessed, by his own admission, a quality that makes this genealogy star so relatable. 

“Once you get started (on research), the accumulation gene takes over, and you just want more and more. I got pretty obsessive. I kept adding to the database, as in—I don’t care who’s buried in this graveyard in Tyrone, I just want to know where the transcripts are!” He laughed at himself. 

“I’m not sure if it’s a psychological disorder, where people are addicted to bibliographies,” he joked, “but if there is, I should be there in the listings. And I’m still collecting. I still want a complete set of all the graveyard transcripts from County Tyrone and County Louth. I want to make them available in the most intuitive and easiest way possible.” 

The current database may never be done in his mind, but it can help Irish-ancestry seekers avoid some of the tedium he suffered early on. “I built a tool to make Irish genealogical research easier and more comprehensible. It is very much a working tool,” he said. “It’s something that will help you to make sense of Irish records, which can be difficult to do, and to see how they fit together, and to do a lot of the fitting-together for you, on screen, visually through maps if at all possible.” 

“It’s the work of nearly a quarter-century, and it’s not coming to an end any time soon,” he assured—which means good news for researchers just starting to discover the possibilities. 

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www.Johngrenham.com is free for five page views per day, then by subscription (per year, per month, or single day unlimited use). His books are available through his website as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores. 

Shelagh Braley Starr is editor of RELATED, a genealogy magazine for Irish by Ancestry members. Her work has been published in the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, Family Traveller magazine, and more. She can be reached at shelagh@byancestry.com