Easy steps for finding Irish kin
Nicola Morris, Irish expert on WhoDoYouThinkYou Are?, explains how to trace your forebears in Ireland, as Boy George and Lee Mack do in the new series
You’ve probably heard that Irish research is all but impossible because everything was destroyed in a fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922. But it’s simply not true. Yes, the loss of 19th-century census returns makes life more difficult for family historians, but the challenge is far from insurmountable. There are plenty of other sources that survived intact, and many Irish resources are now freely available online. For example, when we researched the ancestors of Boy George for the new series we discovered that they were well documented in the records of civil registration, surviving census returns, parish and workhouse registers, and military files.
Once you have mined other family members, and their attics, for everything that is known about your Irish forbears, you will be ready to get started. Use the records for the country in which your Irish-born ancestors settled to gather as much information as you can find. The more you can discover about your ancestors before you start your research in Ireland, the better your chances of success.
First principles
Use your ancestor’s marriage certificate to establish their father’s name and occupation. Check census returns, death certificates, death notices in newspapers and gravestone inscriptions to establish their approximate year of birth and even their specific place of birth. Search for evidence that they had siblings or parents who also emigrated, and who may appear as sponsors to the baptisms of their children or witnesses to their marriage. You will have a far better chance of locating an ancestor named Patrick Murphy if you know that he was born in the city of Waterford c1873 to James Murphy, a tailor, and Sarah, and had older siblings named Peter and John, than you will if you are just looking for a Patrick Murphy born in Ireland in the 1870s.
If your Irish-born ancestor or their siblings or parents were alive and living in Ireland in 1901 or 1911, then they should appear in the only complete surviving census returns for the country. Both returns are freely available online at the site
census.nationalarchives.ie. The search engine requires exact spelling of surnames, so it is often sensible to try wildcards. So rather than looking for Patrick Glynn, try searching for all persons with the surname ‘Gl*n’, which will include variants ‘Glyn’ and ‘Glinn’ and then organise the results in alphabetical order by forename, which will show all men named ‘Patrick’, ‘Patt’ and ‘Pat’. The census should state the age, county of birth, occupation, religion, marital status and literacy of each member of the household, though you should always check the image of the original return, because the online transcripts can contain errors.
Civil registration in Ireland commenced in 1864 when it became compulsory to register all births, deaths and marriages. However, it should be noted that an estimated 15 per cent of births and marriages went unregistered, so not every child born in Ireland will appear in these records. The indexes for civil registration have been freely published online at familysearch.org and irishgenealogy.ie, and the latter site has the original birth registers from 1864 to 1916 digitised and free to view. Search the index for the entry you are interested in, then just click through to the image of the original registration.
Marriage registrations are also available to view between 1870 and 1941, and death registrations from 1878 to 1966. A birth registration will record the parents of the child, the address of the family and the occupation of the father. A marriage registration will record the name, age, address and occupation of the bride and groom, as well as the names and occupations of their fathers and the names of the witnesses, and will identify the church in which the marriage took place. Since marriages usually occurred in the parish of the bride, this may also identify the parish in which she was baptised. These are vital records for Irish genealogical research that have survived intact. For those original images that are not available online, a copy can be ordered from the Health Service Executive’s website at bit.ly/hse-certificates.
Back before registration
If your ancestor was born prior to the start of civil registration in 1864, you will have to search for evidence of their baptism, rather than their birth. All Roman Catholic children were baptised, usually within days of their birth. A record of their baptism was usually entered into the parish baptismal registers. The dates for these registers vary from parish to parish, with some records dating back to the 17th century while others only commenced in the 1860s or later.
Land in 19th-century Ireland was organised into civil parishes for the purposes of civil administration. However, civil parishes do not always correspond with Roman Catholic parishes, which often have different boundaries and in some cases different names. When an immigrant ancestor was asked their place of birth in Ireland, they gave the name of the townland where they originated, the name of the nearest large town or the name of the Roman Catholic parish to which they belonged. Understanding how the country was organised into civil and
The dates for baptismal registers vary – some go back to the 17th century
Roman Catholic parishes can help you navigate these records.
My colleague John Grenham has created a valuable site for working with parish records. Using the search function at bit.ly/johngrenhamplaces you can navigate to maps of civil parishes or Roman Catholic parishes for each county. If you settle on a civil parish, you can click through to the corresponding Roman Catholic parish or parishes for that area – one civil parish may be served by more than one Roman Catholic parish. John has listed the surviving records for each parish, as well as where these records can be found online. There is no point searching a database of parish registers if the records for the parish in which your ancestors originated do not survive for the period of their baptism.
Parish registers
Databases of parish registers can be found on a number of websites. The most useful is the subscription site
rootsireland.ie where you will find transcribed parish registers for most, but not all, parishes in Ireland. This collection includes Roman Catholic and, in some cases, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian registers, as well as the records of civil registration. Take some time to investigate the ‘Online Sources’ information in the ‘Help’ section to make sure the site has the records that you want for the county you are researching.
The search engine on this site is excellent and will account for a wide variety of surname variants, but does require a specific spelling for a first name. If you just put in the first two letters of a first name, you will get all variants that appear, so searching for a Sarah Reilly with the letters ‘Sa’ will also locate ‘Sally’ and ‘Sara’. This site was particularly helpful when researching Lee Mack’s family
in Ballina, Co Mayo, enabling us to locate siblings of his earliest identified ancestor by searching for any Farrell children baptised to a mother with the name Maria Keane. The National Library of Ireland holds microfilm copies of nearly all historic Roman Catholic parish registers for Ireland up to 1880. The library has digitised the images of the registers and made them freely available online at registers. nli.ie. Both ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk have transcribed and indexed these records. However, the transcriptions are not always reliable, so it may be sensible to also consult rootsireland.ie or even undertake a manual search of the images of the original registers.
In the absence of 19th-century census returns, Irish genealogists use census substitutes: records that also enumerated the population. The most valuable is Griffith’s Valuation, a nationwide survey of property taken between 1847 and 1864 for the purposes of assessing the rate of a tax, which was levied for the upkeep of the poor and destitute of the parish. Griffith’s Valuation is freely available online at askaboutireland.ie/griffithvaluation and is also available at bit. ly/findmypast-griffiths – note that Findmypast has a better search engine, and will take into account variant spellings of a surname.
Household record
The valuation recorded the occupier, landlord (the immediate lessor), description, size and value of nearly all of the property in the country – even if your ancestor leased a small cottage valued at 2s, he should still appear. However, only the head of the household at the time of the valuation was listed. This may be the father or grandfather of your ancestor; the majority of the women who were included in Griffith’s Valuation were widows who had taken over their husband’s property, rather than women who were yet to marry.
Establishing an address for your ancestor’s family in mid-19th century Ireland using Griffith’s Valuation should lead you to parish registers and other sources that might document your ancestors.
Finally, gaps in the survival of some genealogical sources mean that you sometimes have to be creative in your approach. If you are having trouble locating your ancestor, try searching for their siblings or neighbours who might have come from the same place in Ireland – they may have left a better trail of documentation behind them.