Specifications: 6" x 9" size; 244 + xxvi pages; 40 illustrations; well indexed by surname. Includes Castles in County Kerry; family seats of power; locations; variant spellings of family names; full map of County Kerry, coats of arms, and sources for research. From ancient times to the modern day. First Edition in dust jacket. Author/Editor: Michael C. O'Laughlin. Please remember that the first book in the Irish Families Project, "The Book of Irish Families, great & small" has information on Kerry families not contained in this book.

This is the master volume to the 28 book set on Irish Family History from the Irish Genealogical Foundation. The largest and most comprehensive of the series, this volume includes family histories from every county in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It also has, for the first time, the complete surname index for the entire series. The 27 other books which are indexed in this volume will provide additional information on even more families.

These invaluable guides include church records, civil and land records, censuses, newspapers, commercial directories, school records and others, where they can be accessed, and how they can be used to best effect.

Becoming German tells the intriguing story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America. The so-called Palatine migration of 1709 began in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where perhaps as many as thirty thousand people left their homes, lured by rumors that Britain's Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and land in America. They journeyed down the Rhine and eventually made their way to London, where they settled in refugee camps. The rumors of free passage and land proved false, but, in an attempt to clear the camps, the British government finally agreed to send about three thousand of the immigrants to New York in exchange for several years of labor. After their arrival, the Palatines refused to work as indentured servants and eventually settled in autonomous German communities near the Iroquois of central New York.Becoming German tracks the Palatines' travels from Germany to London to New York City and into the frontier areas of New York. Philip Otterness demonstrates that the Palatines cannot be viewed as a cohesive "German" group until after their arrival in America; indeed, they came from dozens of distinct principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was only in refusing to assimilate to British colonial culture—instead maintaining separate German-speaking communities and mixing on friendly terms with Native American neighbors—that the Palatines became German in America.