Betham's Will Abstracts, a report from attempted use

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smcarberry
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Betham's Will Abstracts, a report from attempted use

Post by smcarberry » Mon Dec 09, 2019 9:58 am

This is not a resource for my own genealogy, as my main family line of Donnellan has its own pedigree compiled before 1922 by the Office of Chief Herald. However, there are two entries in Betham's Will Abstracts for another Clare family, whose descendant I am assisting. I have kept this resource on the back burner but this past week I went to a LDS (Mormon) FHC (genealogy room) to use a digitized version of the LDS filming for this. This link goes to a description that corresponds to what I saw during my attempted use: https://timeline.ie/bethams-will-abstracts/

My research in Betham's was in the section described in that linked article, Ms. 223-54, for which I had a volume and page number from the McAnliss index. Both of the volumes I needed are ones not online at the National Library of Ireland website (described in the linked article), so I needed to scroll through the LDS film of it (100103) until I reached "item 2." Page numbers are at the top of each page, and the film clarity is good. Nonetheless I failed to see anything relating to the surname I sought. Those dozens of pages comprise many of Betham's volumes, but the start of any specific volume was impossible for me to find in the amount of time I had. The handwriting is fairly cramped, requiring time to read through each entry on a page, no quick visual scanning. My tip is to allow a lot of time for this.

What I also want to get across to you is the potentially huge value of this resource if your research could benefit from a family connection back in the 1600-1700s. The "sketch pedigree" of Behtham's Will Abstracts is like Rosemary ffolliott's biographical extract of a newspaper article: packed full of detail of the type useful for genealogy, far beyond just a name and date. Apparently Betham used the wills (perished in the fires of 1922) as his resource, but those documents do not appear in his volumes. From those he developed family trees for certain families, for which this series is a goldmine. For example, Volume 1 of Ms.223-54 covers Browne, Fitzgerald, Hamilton, Stewart, Walker, White, and Wilson. The pages are annotated pedigrees in tree form. You get all the details that could be gleaned from a will, plus the benefit of Betham's analysis of how each mentioned individual fits into a family tree.

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