#bingmap

 When I’m working in Rothe House, people come in and ask for our ancestry services. As I’m working Fridays and Saturdays and the genealogist Mondays and Tuesdays, I can usually only refer them to our website or send them to the Births, Deaths and Marriage certificate office. Anyway, these people from the States came in and were looking for an ancestor who had been born (acoording to his tombstone in Iowa) in “New Church in Kilkenny”. I couldn’t find “New Church”, but I did find “Newchurch”.

The ancestor had been born in 1798 and baptised in 1800. The 1798 chap was probably a brother who died young and the parents just used his name again, is my guess. It would’ve been unusual to wait for two years to get the child baptised, with the high child mortality and all.

Anyway, I had mapped Newchurch on OpenStreetMaps, and it turns out, there is only one house there now. However, drumroll, there are four ringforts that you can clearly see on the satellite view. I won’t include a screenshot, just go and explore yourself. I think that is a quite settlement. The next ringfort is only a stonethrow away in Ballygowan, and I presume they would have had different borders back in the day.