Is the location where your ancestor lived governed by a township, city, county, or federal government? Once you know this one fact, you will begin to know where the records involving your ancestors were originally created. Then you can find out where those records are today.

NOTE: For those of you doing research in countries outside the United States, you must get down to the actual town or parish level because most countries do not have a national or statewide type of civil registration. This means that you will need to learn about other record types and techniques that will be covered in next semester's lessons. But the principles behind the record types and techniques for finding jurisdictions are basically the same. The key is that knowing where the person was born in the "old country" will depend on records "in the new country." So we must start with U.S. Sources.

One semester, half of the students in the class had Irish ancestors. I, therefore, decided to use Irish research as a case study for them to understand the problem of working with jurisdictions. But as alluded to previously, their ancestors were also American, and the clues to finding the ancestor in Ireland would usually be found in American records.

Let us apply the principle of learning about our ancestor's environment to the country of Ireland. For a little island roughly 300 miles long by 150 miles wide, Ireland certainly creates some big headaches when it comes to tracing one�s ancestors. To begin with there are 32 counties in Ireland. Within these counties are 273 baronies, 153 Poor Law Unions, 2,445 civil parishes, more than 1,300 Catholic parishes, and over 60,000 townlands. In this bewildering array of statistics, where does one start if the place of origin in Ireland is unknown?

If you don�t know the parish in Ireland to begin, it is essential that you start your research in the countries to which your ancestors and their families went. The same principles that are taught in the second and third semesters of the tracing immigrant origins track to the United States will help us here. Although various examples or sources shown in this Irish case study are going to be country specific, please remember that similar sources exist in other countries to which the Irish immigrated. Also if you don't have Irish ancestors, the principles learned will apply to your ethnicity as well. Frankly, most are universal principles.