Whether you descend from traces back to Highland warriors or Irish ancestors who crossed the seas, tracing your roots can be a fascinating journey into the past.
With centuries of detailed records, digitised archives and modern DNA tools now at your fingertips, discovering where you come from has never been more accessible. Here’s how to begin tracing your Irish and Scottish family tree.
How to trace your family roots
As with all genealogy, it’s best to start with the family details you already know, and work from there. Begin with living relatives, and ask questions about their histories and what they might remember of their relatives. Use this fact-finding mission to gather names, dates and locations.
At this point, you could consider DNA testing or ancestry kits, to map your ethnic mix, find relatives and trace ancestral lineages. There are lots of these available online, including AncestryDNA, 23andMe and MyHeritage.
There are several archives available online for you to discover more about your family history. Remember though, there are often variations in spelling and record-keeping, so you may need a few confirmed facts before you pursue a lead. What’s more, it’s always worth remembering that people with the same surname aren’t necessarily related, particularly with more common names. Smith, Brown, Wilson, Campbell, Stewart, Thomson and Robertson are very common in Scotland, for instance, while Murphy, Kelly, O’Sullivan, Walsh and Byrne are commonly Irish surnames.
Once you’ve found a few family names and details, you will hopefully then be able to determine the areas your family has lived in, and this may lead to further discoveries about their ways of life.
If your family members emigrated abroad, you could look into census records in the countries they moved to, as well as naturalisation records or even passenger lists.
As well as online records, you could also visit the National Records of Scotland, the Public Record Office or Northern Ireland or the National Library of Ireland in person.
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How to trace your Scottish roots
To trace your family back to its Scottish roots, you’re best off starting with Scotland’s People, the official Scottish Government’s website for genealogy. It provides online access to millions of records dating back to 1538, with searchable digitised images of statutory registers, church records and wills. As well as wills and testaments dating back to the 16th century, the website also has birth, death, marriage and census records from the 19th century onwards. Searching these indexes is free, but if you want to download any material you may need to pay.
If your surname is associated with a specific clan or region, you can use resources from ScotClans.
How to trace your Irish roots
If you know a name or two from your family that may be connected to Ireland, you should head over to The National Archives of Ireland, which is where you’ll find Irish censuses from 1846 onwards.
If you have Irish heritage, you could find out whether your family is connected to one of Ireland's most iconic exports: Guinness. The Guinness Archive has partnered with genealogy website Ancestry to digitise all its records. Find out how to trace your Guinness Irish ancestry here.
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