About this atlas

MyIreland.ie is a labour of love with one simple idea at its heart: Ireland's history should be something you can see, and something that makes you feel at home. Drag the timeline and ten thousand years sweep across the island — hunter-gatherers, tomb builders, the Five Fifths, Vikings, Normans, plantations, famine, revolution, partition, peace. Tap a county and it tells you its story. Type your surname and the map lights up where your people come from.

And everywhere, the unknown history — the stories that rarely make the schoolbooks: the famine deadlier (per head) than the Great Famine, the boy crowned King of England in Dublin, the Mayo lighthouse reading that saved D-Day, the "notable city" on Ptolemy's map that no one has ever found.

Why I made this

I'm Diaz Xavier, and I built this in Sligo, under Benbulben and Queen Medb's cairn. By day I run Sevenoways Innovations, a digital marketing agency. This is not that. I spent the last while making it as a passion project, with no ads and no paywall, because it was the thing I wished existed and could not find.

What I wanted was to be able to see it. Not a wall of dates, but a map you can drag through ten thousand years and watch the land change hands. Type in your surname and find where your people came from. Tap your county and read what was happening there while the rest of the world was busy elsewhere. Whether you were born here, left, or came and stayed, the story is yours either way.

It is a growing book, not a finished one. I get things wrong, and I would far rather hear about it: there is a page for corrections, I read every one that comes in, and the changelog records what changed and who prompted it. A good number of the pages here exist because a stranger took the trouble to tell me I had it wrong.

I keep it curated rather than open to editing, and the honest reason is quality control. I would rather be slow and checkable than have a county's rulers quietly rewritten by someone with a grudge or a family legend.

I write it with the help of an AI model, working to my direction, and I would rather tell you that here than have you guess. The colophon sets out what that means and what it does not, with examples you can check: the claims I cut because they could not be sourced, and the pages that say plainly that something is not known. The history itself comes from the public record, and every source is listed.

It costs nothing to use and carries no advertising. If it has been useful and you want to put something towards the server bill and the hours, there is a tip jar: buy me a coffee. It shows on your statement as myireland, and the payment is handled by Buy Me a Coffee — this site never sees your card details. Nothing here sits behind it. Every page is free and stays free.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Honesty about the map

Ireland's 32 traditional counties are used as the map's units in every era, including eras long before counties existed — exactly so that you can always find the place you care about. Before the 1600s (and especially before 1169), boundaries between kingdoms and lordships were fluid, contested and often unknowable, so the county-by-county assignments are honest approximations of the dominant power rather than survey lines. Where the scholarship is genuinely uncertain, as with Ptolemy's tribes and the early over-kingdoms, the text says so. If you know better, tell me. Corrections make the map truer.

Sources

Everything here is drawn from the public historical record and written for this site rather than lifted from anywhere. The backbone comes from the great public-domain sources and standard reference chronologies of Irish history, including:

• The Irish annals — the Annals of the Four Masters, Annals of Ulster and Annals of Inisfallen (via public scholarly editions such as CELT, University College Cork).
• Ptolemy's Geographia (c. 150 AD) for the earliest map of Ireland's tribes.
• Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (c. 1634).
• P.W. Joyce, A Concise History of Ireland and Irish Names of Places (public domain).
• Rev. Patrick Woulfe, Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall / Irish Names and Surnames (1923), for clan and surname origins.
• Standard modern chronologies and the published archaeological record for prehistory (Mount Sandel, Céide Fields, Newgrange, Ross Island, Corlea and more).

County outline geometry is derived from "Island of Ireland location map.svg" on Wikimedia Commons, simplified for the web, and re-shared under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

The photographs

Not one picture on this site was taken by me. They come from Wikimedia Commons, taken by people who chose to release their work under a free licence so that strangers could use it. Only freely-licensed files are used — public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Nothing here is used under "fair use": where no free photograph of a place or a saint exists, that page simply has no photograph, which is why some of them don't.

Attribution is a condition of most of those licences, not a courtesy, so the photographer's name and the licence sit beside every picture, and every one of them is listed again on the picture credits page. If a photograph of yours is here and the credit is wrong — or you would rather it wasn't here at all — email hello@myireland.ie and it will be corrected or removed, no argument.

Corrections & contact

Every claim on this site can be traced to a source, and every page has a "suggest a correction" link. If I have got something wrong, whether a date, a boundary or your family's story, tell me at hello@myireland.ie or through the contribution form. Contributors are credited here by name.

A word to the diaspora

If your people left from a Famine port, a Derry quay or a Shannon airport — this is your map too. More than 70 million people worldwide claim Irish descent. Find your county, find your name, and know that the story on this map is yours. Fáilte abhaile — welcome home.