Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today, is a perfect day to share a neat interactive story map produced by ESRI.

Mapping the Emerald Isle: a geo-genealogy of Irish surnames is an interactive map depicting the distribution of Irish surnames across Ireland according to the 1890 census. To use the same simply select a name from a drop-down menu in the list and the map will change to show you in which counties people with that surname lived in 1890. The map will also provide you with a list of number of households with that surname in each county. For example, I discovered that there were 301 Byrne households in Dublin county in 1890.

Applications for Education
This is a neat example of mapping data. Your students could create similar maps using either ESRI’s mapping tools or Google’s My Maps tools. I have found Google’s My Maps tools to be easier for new users to understand. A playlist of tutorials about Google’s My Maps can be seen here.