Hi Shonagh,
You said it a lot better than I do.
You are not only one who have this experience and the "problems" with tracing our Irish ancestors.
I feel much better now--I was trying to say along your line of thinking. Perhaps my English is not good enough, eh?
I think people did not mean to moan about it--I think it is more of frustration.
For instance, I found a gravestone back home--I was right it was our ancestors, on my first visit to the cemetery years ago--I was told off by my relative it was not our relatives, etc. After several years of researching, I was able to piece that the ancestors who were buried next to my Dad's grandfather were related to us.
On the second visit, I took the details off the gravestone as well as some photos of it.
Armed with the details, it turned out that I was spot on on three people buried there--but one person continued to elude me because I could not make any connection with this deceased person with ours. I was thinking it is a likely erroneous information on the informant's part but his relationship only complicated the matter for me. I could not figure out how he was related to us!!
This showed you how "difficult" the research can be with Irish ancestors. I am fortunate to have ancestors who left fairly accurate details to us but with few of them are difficult to trace because of the olden days' commonplace of spouses' early deaths and having to remarried again. It makes things a bit difficult for me because you have no censuses to show linkages between one family to next. All of this happened before 1901.
Anyway, it is always enjoyable and fascinating part of doing genealogy--trying to puzzle the information together and determine the relationships, so on.
Thank you for taking time to put this issue in a "right perspective" of what this posting is all about.
Thanks,
Tees