Genealogy databases are powerful, but they can be intimidating. Which field do you put the townland in? Should you search 1901 or 1911? What if you only half-remember a detail? AI Search is our answer to that friction: a search box you can simply talk to.
Ask the way you’d ask a person
Instead of filling in a form, you type a question the way you would ask a fellow researcher — for example, “Show me Maguire families in County Fermanagh in the 1911 census” or “Who was living in the townland of Drumaa in Griffith’s Valuation?” AI Search interprets what you mean, works out which records to look in, runs the search, and shows you the results alongside a short written summary of what it found.
What it searches
AI Search looks across the core record sets on Irish Roots: the 1901 and 1911 census returns, Griffith’s Valuation, and the full townland hierarchy of counties, baronies, civil parishes and electoral divisions. Because it understands the relationships between these — that a townland sits inside a parish, which sits inside a county — it can answer questions that would otherwise take several separate searches to piece together.
Staying on topic
AI Search is deliberately focused. It only answers questions about Irish genealogy and places — it is not a general-purpose chatbot. That focus is a feature: it keeps results grounded in the actual records rather than wandering off into guesswork, and every answer is backed by the underlying data you can click through and verify.
You bring the question; AI Search works out which records hold the answer.
Irish Roots
Getting started
AI Search lives in your account, so you will need to be signed in to use it. Once you are, start broad — a surname and a county is often enough — and then refine your question based on what comes back. Think of it as a conversation with the records rather than a single lucky query.