Finding your Irish ancestors

Civil records: 1845 and 1864

Non-Catholic marriages were registered from 1845. Births, deaths and marriages of all religions, including Catholic marriages, were registered from 1864.

Free online: irishgenealogy.ie

irishgenealogy.ie, run by the Irish State, shows civil records free, without registration:

One more year is added every year. Records for Northern Ireland after 1922 are held by GRONI, the General Register Office for Northern Ireland, which charges for access.

Catholic parish registers

The National Library of Ireland publishes the Catholic parish registers free at registers.nli.ie: about 3,500 registers from 1,086 parishes, around 373,000 images.

• Most registers stop in 1880, the cut-off date of the microfilming.
• City parishes often start in the 1750s; most rural parishes only after 1828; in the west, often not before the 1850s or 1860s.
• These are images only, without a name index: you need the parish.

Church of Ireland and Presbyterian records

Church of Ireland registers go back to 1536, but two thirds were destroyed in 1922. The surviving ones are listed by the Representative Church Body Library. Presbyterian registers start, on average, around 1830; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has a guide to them.

Getting a copy

The GRO Research Room is on the second floor of The Guild, Cork Street, Dublin 8 (GROResearchRoom@welfare.ie). A copy of an entry costs €5 and a day of general search €20 per person. Certified copies are ordered from the GRO in Roscommon.

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Irish emigration

Between one and two million people left Ireland during the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1855. The main destinations were the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. For British and Irish records in one place, Findmypast is the specialist.

Sources