Best Websites
Surveys sources for seeking out your ancestors who lived on the Emerald Isle
The key online resources for tracing your Irish ancestors
The destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland during the Irish Civil War in 1922 still casts a shadow over Irish research, but every year gaps in the historical record are bridged online. Indeed the Beyond 2022 project ( beyond2022.ie) is seeking to create a digital replica of the Public Record Office before its destruction, including copies and transcripts of lost material.
This month’s sites hold some vast datasets, from long-available census substitutes to civil and parish-level records that have been released since we last covered the topic.
A starting point for those trying to fix dates is the civil registration indexes available via Irish Genealogy (see page 48) or FamilySearch ( familysearch.org/search/collection/1408347)
– this excludes index records for Northern Ireland after its creation in 1922. And it’s worth getting to grips with the Griffith’s Valuation ( askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation), which was compiled in the mid-19th century to determine liability for paying rates to support the poor and destitute within each of Ireland’s Poor Law unions.
w www.irishgenealogy.ie
This invaluable website for family historians offers free images and indexes for the country’s civil registration records. At present there are indexes to births (1864–1919), marriages (1845–1944) and deaths (1864–1969), and the coverage in images of original registers is close behind. You can search for a first and last name, a location and a date, then review the list of results and click through to the original images, which should hopefully provide answers to confirm or rule out the individual. The coverage of the church records varies, but includes both Catholic and Church of Ireland registers from Carlow, Cork and Ross, Dublin and Kerry.
IRISH WAR MEMORIALS
w irishwarmemorials.ie
Here you can explore a growing database of cross-conflict memorials in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – one recent addition is a 1798 memorial that stands in Church Street, Granard, County Longford. Each memorial is accompanied by details of its exact location and images, from where you can either search the names recorded, or download a PDF containing a full transcription. The website covers all kinds of memorials, from free-standing monuments such as crosses, obelisks and statues, to plaques and even paper records if they are on display, making it extremely useful even though graves are not included.