Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School Instructors
Fiona Fitzsimons
Instructor Website: http://www.eneclann.ie/about-eneclann/meet-the-team/#fiona
Teaching: W05: Irish Genealogy Workshop (Friday only)
Fiona graduated in history in 1992, and subsequently tutored at Trinity College Dublin. Fiona Fitzsimons is Research Director of Eneclann, which she co-founded in 1998 with Brian Donovan. Since then Eneclann has completed over 10,000 individual commissions, ranging from private family history research and house histories to media research for television programmes. Research credits include the British, Irish, Australian and Canadian productions of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, RTÉ’s ‘Ancestors During the Famine’ and ‘Faces of America’ (NBC). As Eneclann’s Research director, Fiona plays a key role in developing and ensuring quality in the company’s digital publications and online resources at www.irishorigins.com and elsewhere. Fiona and her research team have also completed some of the largest historical research projects ever undertaken in Ireland, developing new methodologies to be tested and used by others. Work includes an audit of the accuracy of the Irish Genealogical Project’s database of 16 million records and the Irish Battlefields Project. The Irish Battlefields Project, commissioned in 2008 by the Department of the Environment, is the Irish corollary of the U.K. Battlefields Trust Project. This project covers a millennium of Irish history, and in her role as researcher for the early modern period and project manager Fiona drew on her formal historical training.
Areas of specialization include Gaelic lordships and Irish lineages; Irish land law 16th to 20th Centuries; Dublin Guilds and artisan-business 17th to late 19th Centuries; and Irish records for fostering and ‘boarded-out’ children, prior to 1952. She has also made a particular study of collections including the records of the Valuation Office, the Registry of Deeds, and the Petty Sessions Courts in Ireland. She has published scholarly articles in academic journals and books of essays, and was also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Ireland (Rutledge Publications New York), and The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford University Press).