Hi Forrest, > I wonder would there be a tithe > applotmant book around the time of my 8X g-grandfather Francis HOBSON and of > Valentine HOLLINGSWORTH, in the early 17th c? The short answer is no. If you do some reading on Tithe Applotments you'll quickly learn that what we call "Tithe Applotments" was an all Ireland project. That's why it's so valuable. Excepting for the ones we don't have (only a few) we have these records for all of Ireland. Thus it is a very good census substitute. You can read about it here: http://www.shrule.com/_shrule/_display.php?fid=18&pid=186 I found this page by typing www.google.com into my brower and then Tithe Applotments. There are 592 other documents on the INternet on it. Some will actually be transcriptions. You have more of a chance of finding something interesting in these pages than going to Vegas or Atlantic City today and tossing away pennies in slot machines. But I gotta go out so you gotta do the looking. There's a massive amount of stuff to know about these things and if you don't learn you will miss all kinds of clues. This we cannot afford when we got so few clues to start with <grin>! Before that there were tithes collected in the parishes and sometimes records of those survive as well as other types of parish documentation like vestry books. Over in Engerland where the parish system functioned, unlike Ireland, where it, like everything else, didn't, you have 'parish chests' (that were really a huge chest!) full of all kinda goodies. I think they boiled them for broth in IReland during the Famine...but some parish records do survive. You'd check the LDS catalog (spending an hour or two trying out different searches) and the usual sources like Ryan "Irish Records" for it, and if really serious there's always Hayes and Smiths Inventories. (www.rootsweb.com/~bifhsusa ). Of course for any of this to be useful you gotta know the parish and many times we don't. s you know, Francis was tried > convicted and jailed for not paying tithe and Valentine had his crops > regularly raided by the King's tax collectors. I am always looking for > additional details about the death of my 8X g-grandfather. His death isn't likely to be in the tithes. Once you croak you don't have to pay tithes on Planet Earth any more <grin>. Try wills, both parish and prorogative....or rather the indexes and secondary collections that survive the Four Courts Fire. Deeds too. You might also embark on a search of court records (that survive) to see if he was a big enough non payer of tithes to make it into court records, on up to parlimentary records. For example possibly a list of non payers was submitted to Parliament. Next question is which Parliament? That depends on when your ancestor wasn't paying taxes. As a consequence of the United Irish Rebellion, the Irish Parliament was disolved and Ireland was ruled directly from London. Most likely a nice list was found by a real scholar already and published, so maybe checking Hayes is a better use of time....Donno!! Usually we on this list can't find no Irish records. Actually there's a huge amount but we don't know how to find them or use them. The cure is education. To do that you can start on line but you gotta do some reading and course taking, alas. Sometimes we hire someone in Dublin or Belfast. They go to PRONI or NAI and can't find anything. We think that's it. There's nothing. No. There's nothing in those two places that are easy to find given what we know. There's possibly a lot of stuff or at least a clue or two elsewhere or in the same places. I have here a huge fat book with long lists of Irish things in English repositories. You gotta learn to use Hayes and Smiths Inventories and such to find stuff. Salt Lake aggregates stuff from all over the British Isles. It's a better place to look for ancestors than in Dublin or Belfast unless you know you want a specific rcord that is only in one of thoes places. I once listened to fascinating record on Irish records in London. Ame! ricans never 'go there' to do Irish genealogy because they don't understand what's there to be had there. All kinds of things like apprenticeship records from the early 1700s (filmed in LDS too so you don't even need to cross the ocean to see them). If your brick wall is that you run out of records to hunt through, that's a sign that you need to get more education and do more research. You might need to pause and re evaluate what you do have to find more clues. However we should have a long list of things we want to check in Dublin, PRONI, Salt Lake, DC, etc, etc. If you think you know what's in Salt Lake, you are deluding yourself. I once heard a talk from a director and HE was always finding stuff he didn't know he had and struggling to understand the catalog constantly. But I do recall the day when I thought I had "done" Salt Lake very clearly myself. Nope, and I still haven't viewed those 70 film from PRONI that's there, only a few. Or the huge collection of Irish genealogy from the SOG (Society of Genealogists) in London. Linda Merle

Linda, I'm pretty sure this could be regarded as off-topic, but I just finished a great read, one that gave me a "feel" for what it was like to be Irish and among the "outs" in 17th, 18th and 19th century Ireland. It's the follow up to Rutherford's novel "Princes of Ireland" called "Rebels of Ireland." My only disappointment was that it had much too little to say about the Presbyterians of Ulster, although they did sort of follow a trio of brothers in the linen trade, one of whom stayed in Ulster, one who went to Dublin to expand the business (and became Catholic, which split that family) and the other who went to America. The part of the 860-page tome that dealt with the Famine, in my personal opinion, came near the standards of Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." Even though a novel, it hits the gut with enough historical facts and characters to satisfy. Bill McKinney Erie, Pa.