Amanuensis Monday - Index to the O'Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and Upper Blackwater in Ireland collection

The O'Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and Upper Blackwater in Ireland collection by Albert E. Casey is made up of 16 large volumes containing a huge collection of Irish records covering parts of County Cork and County Kerry. The Casey volumes were printed in the 1950s-1970s and are out of print now. They are in a few libraries around the world and show up on used booksellers sites from time to time.

The collection includes a separate index volume that can help narrow down which book contains the information for a topic and date range. I posted previously about Finding Aids for the volumes, but one thing I haven't seen is a Table of Contents for the index volume itself.

The index isn't quite what you'd expect. While it contains a Table of Contents for each of the 16 volumes in the collection, it also has additional data. Following is the Table of Contents for the index volume.

                                            TABLE OF CONTENTS
                                                                                                                
Introduction

Ireland - maps of provinces and counties - Pages 1-2

Table - the 100 most common surnames in Ireland, 1890 - Page 3

Munster province - map with counties and cities - Page 4

County of Kerry - maps, baronies, parishes, townlands - Pages 5-26

County of Cork - maps, baronies, parishes, townlands  - Pages 27-68 

Map and Table - baronies and parishes in North Cork and East
Kerry along the Blackwater River with identifying numbers
(includes adjoining baronies in Limerick, Tipperary) (see
index pages 8-9 & 29-38 for maps of over 1000 townlands)  - Pages 69-70

Map - streams and places in North Cork and East Kerry - Page 71

Map - North Cork and East Kerry, AD 1602  - Page 72

Most common surnames in North Cork and East Kerry (Griffith's
Valuations 1851) according to heads of families - Page 73

Frequency Distribution of surnames in North Cork & E. Kerry
1851 by parish - those indigenous (P.01) to a parish are
underlined  - Pages 74-77

Tax lists counties of Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary
1851-1852 (Griffith's Valuations)  - Page 78

Tax list North Cork and East Kerry 1823-1834 (Tithes) - Page 79

Landowners, leaseholders counties of Cork and Kerry 500-1908 - Page 80

Diocese of Cloyne, Co.Cork Anglican Church of Ireland 568-1965  - Page 81

Religious Society of Friends in Ireland 1623-1863  - Page 81

Births, Baptisms, Marriages - Cork, Kerry 1291-1900  - Page 82

Diocese of Kerry (Roman Catholic)
   Marriages and Baptisms 1785-1900   - Page 83

Tombstone Inscriptions Cork, Kerry 1237-1908 - Page 84

Wills, Deaths, Administrations 3100 BC - 1900 AD - Page 85

Births, Deaths, Marriages, Events, Newspapers 1749-1948 - Page 86

Lineages and Family Data  - Page 87-93

Miscellaneous data in the O'Kief Series - Page 94

Tables of Contents Volumes I-XVI  - Pages 95-138

Books,Ledgers,Manuscripts Photoprinted, Reprinted or Abstracted - Pages 139-143

The index starts off with some high level maps and a list of the 100 most common surnames in Ireland in 1890. My Creedon and Coakley surnames aren't common outside of County Cork, so not surprising that they didn't make the list. The top five surnames are Murphy, Kelly, Sullivan, Walsh, and Smith. I think I'm lucky mine aren't that common!

Pages 4-72 contain lists and maps of the baronies, parishes, and townlands in County Cork and County Kerry. Each parish is assigned a number which is used on the various maps where that townland appears.

Page 73 lists the top surnames in 1851 in the areas of County Cork and County Kerry covered by the volumes. This time Creedon made the list and is listed as an Irish surname with 90 families.

Pages 74-77 have tables showing the frequency of a surname in each parish in 1851. Those that Casey deemed indigenous to the parish are underlined. This is probably one of the more useful items outside of the Tables of Contents, since it gives a quick overview of the parishes where a surname is most common.

The last line in the example above shows that the Creedon surname had 29 families in Clondrohid parish in 1851. The same numbering system used on the maps is used to identify the parishes and Clondrohid was given number 13. Since the 29 is underlined, that also means Casey identified Creedon as "indigenous" to the parish, but I'm not sure what Casey's guidelines were for that designation.

The next sections identify the Volume number and page ranges for various topics, including a fairly large list of lineages and family data. Finally, on pages 95-138, the actual Table of Contents for each Volume is listed.

The index ends with a couple of long, detailed "scientific" articles by Casey that aren't even mentioned in the Table of Contents. The first of these is called  Odyssey of the Irish Documented by Blood Group and Craniometric Analysis. I wonder what Casey would think of today's DNA analysis!

In future posts, I'll detail some of the individual sections in the index.

Amanuensis Monday is a daily blogging theme which encourages the family historian to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts.

Follow Friday - Finding Aids for the Albert Casey volumes on Ireland

This week I was looking for information on the O'Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and the Upper Blackwater in Ireland volumes by Albert E. Casey. The 16 large volumes making up the Casey collection contain a huge collection of Irish records covering parts of County Cork and County Kerry. I found several good sources of information on the volumes:

• The Cork Past and Present site has an alphabetical index of the volumes for County Cork and County Kerry. From the index pages, I used my browser's Find function to search for the information available for specific volumes (e.g., Volume 7).
   
• County Kerry Genealogy has a nice summary of the contents of each volume in The Casey Collection and partial extracts of some of the data for County Kerry. They also have a very useful PDF file with finding aids for locating information in the volumes, including batch numbers for FamilySearch records. The batch numbers are very handy for finding out which records are indexed in the FamilySearch IGI. One tip on the batch numbers is to put a dash before the last number when entering the batch number on the FamilySearch search screen (e.g. C70078-1 instead of C700781). Entering a batch number and surname helped me narrow down which volumes contained the most data on my surnames.
  
  

• FamilySearch has additional details on their microfilm of the volumes.

Follow Friday is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers and was suggested by Earline Bradt of Ancestral Notes.

Week 4 - Free Offline Genealogy Tools - 52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy Week #4

Week 4 – Free Offline Genealogy Tools: For which free offline genealogy tool are you most grateful? How did you find this tool and how has it benefited your genealogy? Describe to others how to access this tool and spread the genealogy love.

For a completely free tool, I'd have to say the library. I'd also have to admit that I don't use it nearly enough! For my Irish research, several people referred me to the O'Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and the Upper Blackwater in Ireland series. This is a huge collection of Irish records compiled by Albert E. Casey covering parts of County Cork and County Kerry. The closest library to me with this collection is a couple of hours away, but I finally got the chance to take a look at them when I was in town for a concert. I was able to use the indices for the volumes to look up the references to my Creedon/Creeden surname in the short time we had there. I didn't find anything I could tie to my Creeden ancestry, but I wouldn't have even had the chance to look without the free access provided by the library.

The newsletters published by local genealogy societies are another tool I'm grateful for. I suppose these aren't technically free since you have to join the society to receive them, but they are provided as one of the services to members. These newsletters are printed out the old fashioned way on paper and for the societies I belong to, they aren't available online. The newsletters often include local records and histories that aren't available anywhere else. It would be great if the newsletters and the Casey volumes were digitized and available online, for so far that hasn't happened!

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts (one for each week of 2012) that invite genealogists and others to discuss resources in the genealogy community including websites, applications, libraries, archives, genealogical societies and more.