Ep. 32: Tracing Irish Ancestors With AI

"All the Irish records burned." Every genealogist with Irish ancestry has heard this warning and most have believed it long enough to stop searching. In Episode 32 of Ancestors and Algorithms, host Brian shows why that warning is not the whole story.

In a live AI-assisted genealogy research session, Brian traces his own Irish ancestor, Caitlin Flanagan, born around 1831 in County Clare, Ireland, who emigrated to Boston during the Great Famine and left almost no Irish paper trail. Using Perplexity and Claude, he navigates the surviving substitute records for pre-Famine Irish genealogy, the land surveys, tithe records, and Catholic parish registers that the 1922 Four Courts fire did not reach; and builds a credible, documented case for a specific family in a specific townland in western County Clare.

Whether your Irish ancestors came from Clare, Cork, Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Tipperary, Kerry, Limerick, or anywhere across Ireland's 32 counties, the AI-powered research workflow in this episode applies to your search.

This episode is for anyone who has Irish blood in their family tree and hasn't known where to start, or who started searching and walked away when the wall felt impenetrable. It is equally valuable for experienced Irish genealogy researchers ready to integrate AI tools into their workflow.

What you'll learn: 

► How to use Perplexity to map every surviving Irish genealogy record for your ancestor's county before searching a single database 

► How to search Griffith's Valuation (free at askaboutireland.ie) and use Claude to analyze hundreds of entries and pinpoint your ancestor's townland 

► How to cross-reference the Tithe Applotment Books (free at nationalarchives.ie) to build 30 years of corroborating land record evidence 

► How to read Catholic parish register images at registers.nli.ie, including what the Latin abbreviations actually mean 

► Why the 1926 Irish Census, releasing FREE on April 18, 2026  could be the breakthrough your research has been waiting for

3 copy-paste ready AI prompts included. Every workflow uses 100% free tools.

AI tools featured: Perplexity, Claude. Records covered: Griffith's Primary Valuation, Tithe Applotment Books, NLI Catholic Parish Registers, irishgenealogy.ie, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, 1926 Irish Census. Topics: Irish genealogy, Irish ancestry research, AI genealogy tools, AI family history research, Irish records 1922, Four Courts fire genealogy, Great Famine emigration, County Clare genealogy, Catholic parish registers Ireland, Griffith's Valuation, townland research, Irish census substitutes, civil registration Ireland, Genealogical Proof Standard.

Companion Guides with 17 advanced Irish research AI prompts available for Patreon members at ancestorsandai.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:12

In just two weeks, on April eighteenth, twenty twenty-six, something is happening in Irish genealogy that hasn't happened in fifteen years. The nineteen twenty six census of Ireland, the very first census taken after Irish independence, with over 700,000 households returns covering nearly three million people, is going live. Online, free, fully searchable. Now that's remarkable news. And today I'm going to tell you exactly how to use it as part of a complete Irish research strategy. But here's the bigger problem we're solving today. A problem that no census, no matter how extraordinary, can fix. Because before 1926, before 1911, before 1901, there's a gap. A gap created by a single afternoon. June 30th, 1922. And what happened that day changed Irish genealogy forever. Stay with me, because today we're crossing the Irish Sea. Welcome to Ancestors and Algorithms, where family history meets artificial intelligence. I'm your host Brian, and today we're doing something I've genuinely been looking forward to for a long time. We're tackling Irish genealogy head on with AI. If you have Irish roots, you've probably heard that warning by now. Good luck, all the records burned. Well that warning is not quite right. It's not even mostly right. And today I'm going to show you exactly why, using one of my own ancestors in a research session that honestly surprised me. Let's get into it. So I've been sitting on this one for a while. I have an ancestor named Caitlin Flanagan. And let me stop right there just for a second because Caitlin is an Irish name, and in Ireland it is pronounced Catelyn, not Caitlyn. Catelyn. I want to say it right because this woman deserves that much. Catelyn Flanagan. And honestly, I almost didn't pursue her line at all because the moment you start pulling on the Irish thread in any family, you almost immediately hear the warning. The record's burned. Good luck finding anything before nineteen hundred. Ireland is impossible. I've heard it from other researchers for years. And for a long time I believed it enough to keep Catiline in the someday folder. You know that folder. We all have it. The ancestors were going to get to eventually. Well, eventually arrived. Here's what I know about Kathleen from American Records, and it's actually a decent amount. She first shows up in the eighteen fifty federal census listed as Kathleen Flanagan, age nineteen, occupation, domestic servant, birthplace Ireland. She's living in a boarding house in Boston, Massachusetts with eleven other Irish immigrants. Two years later in eighteen fifty two, she marries in a Boston Catholic Church, and that marriage record is the piece that gives me my foothold. It identifies her as Kathleen Flanagan of County Clare, Ireland. County Clare. West of Ireland on the north side of the Shannon River estuary, one county. That's my starting point. From eighteen fifty two forward, the American record trail is actually beautiful. Census records every decade, children documented, her death record in nineteen oh seven, listing her age as seventy five and her birthplace simply as Ireland. And then there's the photograph. It's from around eighteen ninety, passed down through the family, and she's looking directly into the camera with eyes that I can only describe as having seen things. Which makes sense. If Kathleen left County Clare around eighteen forty eight, she walked out of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in nineteenth century history. Because eighteen forty eight in County Clare, Ireland was not a normal time to be alive. The Great Famine had been devastating Ireland since eighteen forty five. A potato blight wiped out the primary food source for the country's poorest people year after year. By eighteen forty eight, County Clare had one of the highest mortality and emigration rates in all of Ireland. A million people died. Another million left in the first years of the famine alone. Kathleen Flanagan arriving in Boston in eighteen fifty was one of the ones who got out. So every time I tried to follow her back across the Atlantic, I hit what I came to think of as the Irish wall. County Clare on a marriage record? That's it. That's the other side of the ocean. And if you've tried to do Irish genealogy research, you know exactly what that wall looks like. Because eventually someone tells you about june thirtieth, nineteen twenty two. Dublin. The Irish Civil War had been raging for two days. Troops loyal to the new Irish Free State are bombarding the Four Courts Building, a magnificent eighteenth century courthouse complex on the banks of the River Lifee. Inside the West Wing, in an area called the Record Treasury, sits the Public Record Office of Ireland, seven centuries of documents, census returns going back to 1821, wills dating to the 1500s, thousands of Church of Ireland parish registers deposited there for safekeeping, land records, court records, hundreds of years of ordinary Irish lives recorded in ink on parchment and paper. On the afternoon of june thirtieth, an explosion rips through the West Wing. The roof caves in. Fire takes hold. By the time it's over, more than eight hundred years of Irish history has been reduced to rubble and ash. The census returns for eighteen twenty one, thirty one, forty one, and eighteen fifty one? Gone. More than half of all Church of Ireland parish registers deposited there? Gone. The majority of wills and testamentary records that had been proved in Irish courts? Gone. For Kathleen born around eighteen thirty one in County Clare, that means she would have almost certainly have been in the eighteen forty one census at age ten, living with her family. Probably in the eighteen fifty one census as well. Those are the two records most likely to tell me exactly who her family was and where they lived. Neither one exists anymore. And yet I kept coming back to her. Because here's the thing that took me a while to really absorb. All the records burned is not the same as all the records are gone. And this is exactly where AI became my most useful research partner. Because AI is your research assistant, not your researcher. What Perplexity and Claude are going to do for Kathleen's research today isn't conjure records that don't exist. They're going to help me find what does exist, where it lives, and what it might actually tell me. Those are three very different things. And getting all three right is what Irish genealogy research is actually about. So here's where I started. Before I could go looking for the Flanagan family specifically, I needed a research map. What records actually survive for County Clare in the time period I'm looking at? What's available online? What's free? Because I do all my initial research on free tools and I want to show you how far free tools can actually take you. For a landscape question like this, I reach for perplexity. And I want to explain why because tool selection matters. Perplexity is an AI powered search engine that searches the live web and returns cited answers. That word cited is doing a lot of work there. When I ask Perplexity what records exist for County Clare Genealogy, it's not drawing on training data from a year ago. It's searching the current public web and telling me what it actually finds, with links I can click and verify. For genealogy research where accuracy and currency really matter, that's exactly what I need. I'm not asking it to guess. I'm asking it to find out. Here's the exact prompt I used. Copy this one. Quote, I am researching Irish genealogy for an ancestor born approximately 1828 to 1833 in County Clare, Ireland, who immigrated to the United States around 1848 during the Great Famine. The ancestor's name was Kathleen Flanagan. I know the 1922 public record office fire destroyed many Irish records. Please give me a comprehensive, organized overview of what genealogical records do survive for County Clare for this time period, including specific websites where I can access them and which ones are free versus paid, end quote. What perplexity returned was genuinely useful, and I want to walk you through the key findings, because this framework applies to anyone researching Irish ancestry from the famine era. The surviving records break into four major categories. Category one, land records. And this is where perplexity introduced me to the two records that form the backbone of Irish genealogy research for the mid-19th century. The first is Griffiths Valuation, officially called the primary valuation of tenements. This was a massive property survey carried out across Ireland between eighteen forty seven and eighteen sixty four. The surveying team went townland by townland, and I'll explain what a townland is in a moment, and recorded the name of every person who occupied land or property, what they held, and what it was worth for tax purposes. It's a property survey, not a census, so it only lists the primary occupier in each household. But in rural Ireland, that almost always means the father or head of family. For County Clare, Griffiths was published in eighteen fifty five, right after the worst years of the famine. Free to search at askaboutireland. Now that word townland, this is a uniquely Irish concept that you need to understand before you can do Irish research effectively. Ireland is divided into provinces, then counties, then baronies, then civil parishes, then townlands. A townland is the smallest unit of land division, typically anywhere from a few acres to a few hundred acres. Your Irish ancestor didn't just live in County Clare. They lived in a specific townland, and knowing which townland is often the difference between finding a family and spending years searching in the wrong place. The second key land record is the Tie the Plotment Book. Between eighteen twenty three and eighteen thirty seven, the British government surveyed every agricultural landowner in Ireland to determine how much they owed in church taxes to the Church of Ireland. Every landowner, regardless of religion. This means Catholic tenant farmers, the majority of rural Ireland, show up in these records. For County Clare, these books are free to search at Nationalarchives. Together, Griffiths from the eighteen fifties and the tithe books from the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties bracket almost exactly the period Kathleen was alive in Ireland before she immigrated. If her family held any land at all, they are almost certainly in at least one of these. Category two Catholic Parish Registers. This is the one that matters most for my research on Kathleen, and it's also the one with the most variation. The Catholic Church was not part of the public record office. Their registers stayed in the parishes. Many survived the 1922 fire entirely. The National Library of Ireland has digitized hundreds of them free to view at registers. Here's what perplexity specifically flagged, and it's important. The start dates for these registers vary enormously from parish to parish. Some County Clare parishes have records going back to the early 1820s. Others didn't even begin keeping systematic registers until the late 1840s or 1850s. You cannot assume your parish has early records. You have to check the specific parish on registers.ie before you go searching. For our UK listeners, if your Irish ancestors came from what is now Northern Ireland, your first stop is Prony, the public record office of Northern Ireland. Prony, P-R-O-N-I, holds records not just for the six Ulcer counties, but also for the border counties of Donegal, Cavon, Latrim, Monaghan, and Louth. Their website is at nidirect.gov.uk forward slash P-R-O-N-I. And many collections are free online. And for our Australian listeners, the Society of Australian Genealogists in Sydney holds a substantial Irish research collection, particularly useful for tracing the Irish disapporia that came to Australia. If your Irish ancestry runs through the Pacific rather than across the Atlantic, that collection is worth knowing about. Category three Civil Registration Ireland did not start centrally registering births, marriages, and deaths until eighteen sixty four. Kathleen was born around eighteen thirty one. That's thirty three years before the civil registration system existed. No birth certificate for her. But if any of her family members were born, married, or died after eighteen sixty four, those records exist and they're free at IrishGenealogy. Births from eighteen sixty four to nineteen twenty four, marriages from eighteen sixty four to nineteen forty nine, deaths from eighteen seventy one to nineteen seventy four. Category four The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland at Virtualtreasury. This is a project launched in twenty twenty two on the one hundredth anniversary of the fire. Trinity College Dublin and a network of international archives have been pulling together surviving copies, transcripts, and fragments from archives around the world, digitally reconstructing as much of the lost collection as possible. It's not a genealogy database in the traditional sense, but it is a remarkable place to look for records that were copied before they were burned. Perplexity also flags something I hadn't thought to check. The nineteen twenty six Irish census, the very first census of the Irish Free State, is going live on april eighteenth, twenty twenty six. Two weeks from now. Kathleen died in Boston in nineteen oh seven, so she won't be in it. But if any of her siblings stayed in Ireland and were still alive in nineteen twenty six, they would be. And that could be exactly the piece I need to connect her to a specific family. That is a research lead I had not considered before running that perplexity search. Now I had a real framework. Not all the records burned. Instead, two major land record collections, Catholic parish registers with specific start dates I needed to check, civil registration from 1864 forward, a virtual reconstruction project, and a brand new census dropping in two weeks. Four solid avenues of approach and one exciting near-term opportunity. That is what a reasonably exhaustive research plan looks like before you search a single database. All right, framework built. Time to actually go looking for the Flanagans. I opened Griffiths Valuation at askaboutIreland.ie and searched the surname Flanagan in County Clare. And I want to be up front about the results. 87 entries. 87 Flanagan households across dozens of parishes and townlands throughout the country. That's a lot. But here's where I stopped doing genealogy the old way and started doing it the new way. Instead of sitting down and manually reading through 87 entries, I opened Claude and built an analytical prompt. This is one of the things Claude genuinely excels at, taking a large body of structured data and applying consistent criteria to tiers the results. Here's the exact prompt. Write this one down because you'll use it. Quote, I am researching the Flanagan family from County Clare, Ireland. My ancestor Kathleen Flanagan was born approximately 1828 to 1833 in County Clare and immigrated to the United States around 1848 during the Great Famine. I have found 87 entries for the surname Flanagan in Griffith's evaluation for County Clare dated 1855. I need you to help me analyze this data to identify which entries are most likely to represent Caitlin's family. Please prioritize entries where 1. A male Flanagan is listed as primary occupier, indicating a likely father or older male relative who would have been established before Katleen's immigration. Two, the property description and valuation suggest a small tenant farmer of modest means as opposed to a laborer or larger landowner. And three, multiple flanagan entries appear in the same or adjacent town lens, suggesting an extended family cluster. I will paste the 87 entries below. Please organize them into tiers by probability and explain your reasoning in quote. To use this prompt, you copy the actual text from your Griffith's search results and paste it in below the prompt. Claude reads and analyzes large amounts of text well. That's the whole point. You're not asking it to guess. You're giving it real data and specific criteria and asking it to think through the results for you. What came back was organized into three tiers with clear reasoning at each level. Tier one, entries where the male head of household was approximately the right age to be Caitlin's father. If Caitlin was born around 1831, her father was probably born somewhere between 1790 and 1810, making him forty five to sixty five years old in the eighteen fifty five valuation. Claude flagged entries consistent with that age profile. Tier two, clusters. Any parish or townland where multiple flanagan households appeared in close proximity. Extended families in rural Ireland tended to stay in the same area for generations. A cluster of flanagans in one small place is generally a sign of deep established roots. Tier three, entries that didn't fit. Single entries in large townlands, entries suggesting significant wealth, entries suggesting landless laborers who wouldn't have appeared in Griffiths at all. And then Claude flagged something I had missed entirely when I was scanning the results. In the parish of Kilfarbboy, the Catholic parish centered around the coastal town of Middletown Malbay, there were four separate Flannigan entries in the townland of Cloghaun More. That's from the Irish meaning the big stone causeway. Four flanagan households in one townland. In a rural townland that small, four families sharing a surname is not a coincidence. That is a family. Here's why that matters. Land tenure in rural nineteenth century County Clare meant that land stayed within families. When a father divided his holding among his sons, you ended up with multiple households of the same name or Clustered in the same small area. A cluster of four flanagans in Cloghaun More is the Griffiths valuation telling me there is a family here. This is worth pursuing. Claude Cloghaun More in Kilfarboy Parish as the strongest candidate for deeper investigation and told me exactly what to do next. Cross reference with the tithe applotment books for the same parish. The logic is straightforward. Griffiths is from eighteen fifty five. The Kilfarboy tithe books are from eighteen twenty six. If the same family name appears in the same townland across both records, twenty nine years apart, that is strong evidence of an established, rooted family presence. A family that has been in Cloghaun More since before the famine is a much more credible candidate than one that only surfaces in a single record. So I went to the NationalArchives. And there it was. In the eighteen twenty six tithe records, Martin Flanagan in Cloghorn Moor listed as an agricultural occupier liable for tithes. Martin Flanagan Cloghaun More eighteen twenty six. Back to Griffiths for Cloghaun More. One of the four Flanagan entries, Martin Flanagan, holding a house in approximately half of an acre valued at ten shillings. Martin Flanagan Cloghaun More eighteen fifty five. Same first name Same Townland twenty nine years apart. Now I have to stop here and be honest with myself, which is where the genealogical proof standards come in. Finding the same name and the same townland across two records does not prove anything on its own. Let me be precise about that distinction, because in genealogy it matters enormously. Evidence is anything that might support a conclusion. Martin Flanagan and Cloghaun More in both 1826 and 1855 is consistent with this being Katleen's family. That's evidence. Proof requires that multiple pieces of evidence, taken together, reasonably support a conclusion without significant competing alternatives. I'm not there yet. And here's what I love about using Claude for this kind of analysis. It's honest about that distinction too. When I described the two Martin Flanagan entries and asked for analysis, Claude came back with this. If he was an adult head of household in 1826, he would have been approximately forty five to seventy years old in 1855, which is consistent with being the father of a child born around 1831. The property description, a house in half an acre, valued at 10 shillings, is consistent with a small tenant farmer of modest means, the class of person most likely to immigrate during the famine. However, Flanagan was a common county Clare surname, and naming patterns in rural Ireland mean that the same name could appear across multiple generations in the same area. I cannot confirm this is Kathleen's father without additional corroborating records. The most productive next step would be to search the Catholic parish registers for Kilfarboy Parish, end quote. That is AI doing exactly what it should do. AI is your research assistant, not your researcher. Claude didn't make the decision for me. It gave me a clear, qualified assessment of the evidence and pointed me toward the next logical step. So I went to registers.ie and looked up the Catholic parish registers for Kill Farboy. And here's where I want to be completely transparent about something because this is genuinely how Irish genealogy works. And I think it's important for you to see the actual experience rather than a polished version of it. The Kilfarboy Catholic Registers survive. They begin in November 1831. When I saw that, my heart did a small, complicated thing. November 1831. If Kathleen was born in 1831, based on her age of nineteen in the eighteen fifty census, she was probably born in late 1830 or early 1831. Which means her baptism almost certainly predates the register by months. She just misses it. That is Irish genealogy in one sentence. Close, but not quite there. But here's what is in those registers. In Kilfarboy Baptism Register for March 1835, Margaret Flanagan, daughter of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin, baptized fourteenth March 1835, Cloghaun More. In September 1838, Thomas Flanagan, son of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin, baptized four september eighteen thirty eight, Cloghaun More. In january eighteen forty one, Padrig Flanagan, son of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin, baptized eleventh january eighteen forty one, Cloghaun More. Three children of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin, all baptized in Cloghaun More between eighteen thirty five and eighteen forty one. The same Martin Flanagan who's been in the land record since eighteen twenty six. So here's what I'm looking at now. A man named Martin Flanagan with a documented presence in Cloghaun More townland spanning from eighteen twenty six to eighteen fifty five, a wife named Bridget Tobin. Children baptized in the same townland from eighteen thirty five onward, and an ancestor of mine named Kathleen Flanagan, born around eighteen thirty or early eighteen thirty one, who left County Clare during the famine and arrived in Boston in 1850. She would fit as a daughter of Martin and Bridget, born just before the register begins. I ran the complete picture through one more Claude prompt. The third prompt of today's episode. Quote, I am researching whether Kathleen Flanagan, who appears in Boston, Massachusetts records from 1850 identifying her birthplace as County Clare, Ireland, is a daughter of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin Cloghaun More Townland, Kilfurboy Parish, County Clare. I have the following evidence. One, Martin Flanagan appears in the 1826 Tie the Plotment books for Cloghaun More, Kilfarboy Parish. Two, Martin Flanagan appears in the 1855 Griffiths Valuation for Cloghaun More, Kilfarboy Parish, holding a house and half acre valued at 10 shillings. Three, Catholic parish registers for Kilfarboy beginning November 1831 show baptisms of Margaret, 1835, Thomas 1838, and Padrig 1841, children of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin, all in Cloghaun More. Four, based on the 1850 US Census listing Kathleen as age nineteen, she was probably born in 1830 or early 1831, placing her birth just before the surviving registers begin. Please, A. Correlate this evidence and assess whether it is consistent with Kathleen being a child of Martin and Bridget. B. Identify any significant conflicting evidence. C. Draft a brief, precise research log entry summarizing the evidence, what it supports, and recommended next steps, end quote. What Claude returned was a careful, qualified research log. The key section? Quote, the evidence is internally consistent with Kathleen Flanagan being a child of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin of Cloghaun More. The family has a documented presence in that location from 1826 through at least 1855. The baptism records show children being born Cloghaun More throughout the eighteen thirties and into the eighteen forties, consistent with Kathleen having been born in that same household in eighteen thirty or early eighteen thirty one, just before the surviving registers begin. No significant conflicting evidence has been identified. However, the conclusion cannot be confirmed without a record directly linking Kathleen to Martin and Bridget. The start date of the Kilfarboy registers in november eighteen thirty one is the primary obstacle. Recommended next steps search famine era immigration records from Limerick and Galway ports for Flanagan passengers. Search the virtual record treasury for pre-fire transcripts relating to Kilfarboy, review the 1926 Irish census upon release for siblings or extended family who remained in Ireland, and check post 1864 marriage records for siblings, which often name fathers and mothers in quote. So where does this research session actually leave me? I started with Kathleen appearing in Boston in 1850 with a County Clare birthplace and nothing else on the Irish side. Here's what I built. Perplexity mapped the entire surviving record landscape for County Clare in the 1820s through 1850s. Four real, accessible categories of records. That landscape mapping is what the genealogical proof standard calls reasonably exhaustive research, and it's the step I had been skipping for years by going straight to searching. Claude analyzed eighty-seven Griffiths valuation entries and narrowed the field from countywide down to a specific parish, Kilfarboy, and a specific townland, Cloghaun More. That's the kind of analysis that used to take me an entire afternoon. It took maybe ten minutes. Cross referencing Griffiths with the tithe books put the same Martin Flanagan in the same townland twenty nine years apart. That is the correlation piece. Land records from two different surveys nearly three decades apart, pointing to the same family in the same place. And the Catholic Parish Registers, beginning November 1831, gave me Martin Flanagan and his wife Bridget Tobin, baptizing children in Cloghaun More from 1835 onward. Now I want to be honest with you as I always try to be. This is a partial answer. A strong partial answer, but not proof. What I have is a well supported hypothesis. Kathleen Flanagan was a daughter of Martin Flanagan and Bridget Tobin of Cloghaun More Townland, Kilfarboy Parish, County Clare. That's a different question than somewhere in County Clare. It's a specific, testable, pursuable hypothesis. And it came from one focused research session using two AI tools. Alright, time for this week's homework. If you have Irish ancestry, I want you to do one thing. Find your ancestor's county of origin. Just the county. It could be a marriage record, a death record, a ship manifest, a family story, anything at all. Then go to askaboutIreland.ie and run a Griffiths valuation search for your family surname in that county. Note how many entries come back. Under 20 results, you can start analyzing them yourself. Over 20? Use the Claude prompt from today to tier them. Either way, you've started the climb. If you don't have Irish roots, apply the same thinking to your own research brick wall. Every researcher hits a catastrophe at some point. A courthouse fire, a flood, a war. Ask Perplexity what substitute records survive for your specific county and time period. The answer might surprise you. And share what you find. Come tell us at ancestors and AI.com. The community there is full of researchers working through exactly this kind of problem, and hearing what other people found or didn't find is genuinely part of how we all get better at this. For UK and Australian listeners, Find My Past is worth a specific mention here. It has one of the largest collections of digitized Irish records outside of Ireland, including Catholic parish registers not yet on the NLI's free site and famine era immigration records. It's a subscription service, but they offer free trials, and for a targeted search like this one, a month's access can be worth it. Thank you so much for listening to Ancestors and Algorithms. If this episode changed how you think about Irish genealogy, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Those reviews genuinely matter for helping other researchers find the show. And if you know someone with Irish roots who has been stopped by the all the records burned wall, share this episode with them. It might be what gets them moving again. If you want to go deeper into Irish research beyond what we covered today, the companion guide for this episode is available to Patreon members at ancestorsai.com. It has 12 advanced prompts built specifically for Irish research workflows, Catholic versus Church of Ireland record strategies, a complete Griffiths cluster analysis workflow, famine error immigration chip research, pulling everything into a formal proof argument, and more. If you're doing serious Iris research, that document is going to be a real resource. But everything you need to get started, it's right here in what we just did together. For every episode, our private community, the companion guide library, and all the resources mentioned today, head to ancestorsandai.com. One stop for everything. Next week we're exploring what might be the single most powerful research methodology you're not using, the fan club approach. Friends, associates, and neighbors. When your direct ancestor hits an impenetrable wall, sometimes the answer is standing right next door. We're going to use Claude to build a neighbor network from historical records and see what shakes loose. It is one of the most satisfying techniques I've ever put to work, and I cannot wait to show it to you. I'm your host Brian, and I will see you next week for another journey into the past powered by the future. Until then, happy researching.