Galway Genealogy Tours
My Ireland Heritage find your Ancestors and exact house location from the 1700’s to the late 1800’s, and all available records in Ireland. We are an Irish family business dedicated to assisting you in your Irish Genealogy research for your roots and records of your family history of past generations in Galway, as well as providing you with a once in a lifetime Irish Genealogy tour experience to visit your families original family house and Walk in the Footsteps of your Irish Ancestors.
Sean and the Team at My Ireland Heritage are a Government certified & approved Genealogy & Touring Company, and will personally guide you on the journey into your Irish ancestry to any County in Ireland.
Many companies are genealogy research only, many companies are touring companies only, we at My Ireland Family Heritage are proud to be able to encompass your research and tour together enabling us to work with you throughout the process to customize your tour with you and for you. To achieve a full genealogy tour experience consider adding one of our one-day historical tours.
Our Tours
Our Ancestral Townland Experience Tours
County Galway spans a remarkable range of landscape and history, from the city itself out through Connemara’s mountains and bogland to the Aran Islands, one of Ireland’s strongest surviving Irish-speaking communities. This diversity carries through into genealogy research: a family from Galway city has an entirely different record trail than one from a remote Connemara townland, where Irish was the everyday language and record-keeping was often sparser than in more populous areas.
For Connemara and west Galway families in particular, we frequently need to work carefully between the anglicised surname used after emigration and the Irish-language form that may appear, or not appear at all, in surviving local records. East Galway, by contrast, tends to have more conventional parish records similar to other Leinster and Munster counties. In both cases, our approach is the same: confirm the actual church congregation and graveyard behind the civil parish on record, then locate the townland itself.
A Galway tour can take in the city’s own genealogical resources before heading west into Connemara’s dramatic scenery, or further out toward the Aran Islands for families with roots there, a journey that traces both your ancestors’ daily life and the wider landscape that shaped it.
- Galway has 16 Baronies
- Galway has 115 Civil Parishes
- Galway has 135 Electoral Divisions
- Galway has 4472 Townlands
- Galway has 71 Sub Townlands
The city’s name is from the Irish name for the River Corrib which is the smallest river in Ireland, Abhainn na Gaillimhe (“Stony River”), which formed the western boundary of the earliest settlement, Dún Bhun na Gaillimhe “Fort at the mouth of the Gaillimh”. Historically, the name was Anglicised as Galliv, which is closer to the Irish pronunciation as is the city’s name in Latin, Galvia mentioned by Greek philosopher Ptolemy in the 1st Century.
The city also bears the nickname “The City of the Tribes” because of the fourteen merchant families called the “tribes of Galway” led the city in its Hiberno-Norman period. The term tribes was a derogatory one, because the merchants saw themselves as Anglo-Irish and were loyal to the King during the English Civil War. They later adopted the term as a badge of honour and pride in defiance of the town’s Cromwellian occupier.
The Irish Celtic Tribes By Ptolemy 1st Century 500BC-500AD
- County Galway- The Auteinoi
Family Dynasties 1500-1600 AD
- Irish – O’Connor, O’Flaherty
- Norman – Burke, Birmingham, Blake
- Scottish – None
- Viking – None
County Galway – Things to do and may be possible to include within your Ancestral Townland Experience Tour
- Connemara National Park
- Wild Atlantic Way
- Galway Cathedral
- Galway’s Latin Quarter
- The Spanish Arch
- Eyre Square
- Portumna Famine Workhouse and Museum
- St. Nicholas’ Collegiate Church
- Galway City Museum
Frequently Asked Questions
Is researching Connemara or Aran Islands ancestry different from other parts of Galway?
Yes, these areas have a strong Irish-language heritage which can affect how surnames and place names appear in older records, and we take this into account during research.
Can you help trace ancestors from Galway city itself?
Yes, Galway city has its own set of parish and civic records distinct from the surrounding rural areas, and we research these accordingly.
Is a tour to the Aran Islands possible as part of a Galway genealogy trip?
Where a family connection warrants it, yes, we can incorporate island travel into your itinerary.
