I have been looking at scanned copies online of the Griffiths Valuation for years, so why I got so excited when ancestry.com announced that they had just released actual viewable copies is beyond me.

But... it took the ancestry.com scanned records to bring something to my attention, because that was when I first noticed this oddity. My family comes from Donegal and Tyrone. I've only pulled the Donegal records so far, and have not had a chance to start on the Tyrone records, so I don't know yet if this appears on those or not.

There seems to be specific "pockets" of my relatives on the Griffiths that have dark black pen or pencil marks to the left of their names! On some pages, it may only be one or two names. On other pages, there are a LOT of marks.

On a couple of the pages where a group of relatives were all living pretty much together, there is a big hand written black "X" to the left of their names!

I wrote to the Library of Ireland about this - they asked if these marks were possibly somehow made by the scanning equipment. Nope - they are indeed human made marks. It was suggested that someone may have marked their place while transcribing them. Nope - these marks aren't like that. Some pages will have one person with this black mark. Other pages, there will be two people right next to each other - they will have this mark and no one else on the page does. On yet other pages, there will be several "clusters" of names, and each one of them will have this mark. And the "X" mark by a couple of groups - that really has me baffled.

It was also suggested that I look at other web sites and see if the marks are also on their scanned copies. They are, so they are indeed on the original records.

It wouldn't mean anything to me except for the fact that these marks are appearing to the left of EVERY ONE of my relatives! I thought I would have to use a highlighter or make a mark of my own to pick people out on the Valuation list. Turns out, I don't have to - someone did it for me decades ago! lol

My husband suggested (jokingly) that maybe the marks meant that these people were known troublemakers and they were being brought to someone's attention - who knows? He could be right! lol

It was also considered by another family member that maybe it meant that these people emigrated, and that's what the marks mean. But these aren't the ones who did - these are the family that stayed in Ireland.

I've been extremely lucky in finding my family in Ireland - the relatives managed to keep their ancestry information intact and it has been a piece of cake to gather my data from old saved Bibles and other documents they kept hidden away. We can take our line way back without a break thanks to this.

But... now to the puzzle of WHY are there big black marks by my relatives? Hmm....