A Place for Irish Genealogy, Networking, and More

You may well have noticed that we’ve been covering Irish genealogy a lot lately. (And if you haven’t, our recent posts are here and here.)

In the hope that we haven’t yet overdosed you on Irish content and with the promise that we’ll cover other geographies soon, we thought we’d follow up by introducing a nice new site for the Irish community: RendezVous353.

RendezVous353 was set up by two Irishmen, Richard O’Donnell and Terry McLaughlin, earlier this year. We stumbled across this site a couple of weeks ago, and have since been giving it a whirl.

The site’s designed to offer a hub for the Irish community – both in Ireland itself, and among the 80 million Diaspora overseas. The Irish are, as the former Irish Consul General to New York put it, “a global tribe in a global world.”

The idea behind the site is to provide a community for Irish people across the globe to come together around their common interests. In many cases, this will provide a means to link families together from disparate parts of the world. For others, it can help with business and commercial networks and relationships. For our purposes, it provides a particularly interesting focal point for those in the Irish community: coming together over genealogy.

RendezVous353 has a ‘mini site’ catering to family history, where budding genealogists and family history researchers can get together and work through anything they need help with in the genealogy space. Given that many Irish-specific genealogy questions might be hard to spot in conventional discussion groups, this could prove a very useful resource for those tracing their roots back towards the Irish community. The MiniSite is still small, but growing fast and well worth checking out.

And what does the 353 in the name stand for, you may ask? Quite simply, it’s the international dialling code for Ireland. The RendezVous concept may yet be expanded to other Diasporas across the world on the same basis – 86 for China, 381 for Serbia, or wherever else you can think of.

You can find the Irish Genealogy & Family Roots’ MiniSite (Group) here.