The Northern Ireland Place-Name Project, based in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, has been researching the origins and meanings of local place-names since 1987. Early spellings of the names discussed are abstracted from historical sources, and these provide the evidence necessary to reconstruct the original form of the name and trace its development down to modern times.
Names are dealt with in the traditional civil parish units so that both historical and local context may become clear.
In particular, the value of these volumes to local and family historians is the fact that a very significant proportion of Irish place-names have a personal name element. Thus, they can be a quite unique and ingenious way of trying to identify a family’s link to a particular locality, especially when there is a lack of other documentary evidence to aid the searcher.