Irish Ancestors (irishtimes.com/ancestor) aims to be the first online stopping-off point for anyone interested in researching Irish ancestry.

Its browse section includes: “ most of the fourth edition of ‘Tracing Your Irish Ancestors’, the standard guide to Irish genealogy ;

– the largest online collection of Irish genealogy links;

– detailed civil and Roman Catholic parish maps;

– a step-by-step how-to section;

– an extensive collection of articles on Irish heritage and genealogy.

All are available free.

The Surnames section includes free counts of households by county, surname maps, a surname dictionary, surname histories, coats of arms, links to surname sites and more.

The Placenames section includes a freely searchable database transcript of the 1851 Townlands Index, with results linked to parish maps.

The paying sections of the site (either pay-per-view or subscription) include a parish-by-parish count of households, detailed listings of records for each civil parish, Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary of 1837, linked to the placenames search, a double surname search and “Ancestor Search”, an expert system taking user input and analysing it to produce a detailed profile of all relevant research sources.

A recently added feature is the Research Wizard, analysing what a researcher knows step by step and producing detailed recommendations for further research.

In existence since 1998, Irish Ancestors is the longest-established Irish genealogy web-site and was one of the first successful Irish e-commerce sites. A site-map is available at www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/sitemap.htm.