Resources for Irish Genealogy

Anyone with ancestors in the Emerald Isle has encountered the many challenges of Irish genealogy: the paucity of pre-Famine records, the wild variations in name spellings, the nearly unreadable parish registers, and particularly the disappeared censuses lost one hundred years ago prior to and at the time of the Record Treasury explosion and fire of 1922 (see our article about the recently launched Virtual Record Treasury for more information). How many of us have eagerly obtained a marriage or death certificate in the US or UK, Canada or Australia, and under “Place of Birth” just seen: “Ireland”?

Don’t despair! Although research is roundabout due to the absence of censuses, there are substitutes, and complementary sources, and a number of recent initiatives that have been undertaken to make these sources readily available in the digital era.

Before getting started on our list of resources, let’s review some rules of thumb concerning Irish genealogy, then take a moment to understand how Ireland’s recent history has made Irish genealogy difficult for the uninitiated.

A few rules of thumb

• As always, start with what you know and work backward. Did your Irish people immigrate to your country? If you are in the US and haven’t yet located their immigration record, see our two-part article, Finding Your European Immigrant Ancestor’s Ship (Part 1, Part 2).
• Birthplace: The key to breaking down brick walls in Ireland is to find the place of birth or marriage. The county of origin is a good start — you will want to know if the county is in today’s Northern Ireland or not, as the archive repositories are different on either side of the border. For pre-civil records, it’s the civil or Catholic parish of baptism or marriage you are after, and ideally the “townland” level, a small enough parcel of land that you may be able to locate individual houses if they still exist. Knowing the place allows you to search alternate resources such as property tax records (the Tithe Applotment Books 1823-1838, or Griffith’s Valuation 1847-1864), cemetery records, probate records, criminal records, and so on. In the US, a death certificate usually won’t tell you the town or county of origin of an Irish person. However, a naturalization record, cemetery tombstone, or newspaper obituary might!
• Last name spelling: You will almost without exception find variants in the spelling of your ancestor’s name. For example, names originally spelled in Irish (Gaelic) were transliterated into English. Do you know anyone named Caoimhín Ó Súilleabháin ? Why, that’s just Kevin Sullivan! And did you know that Dermot = Jeremiah? Many people were illiterate. Spelling was not standardized until the late 19th century in any case. Outside of Ireland, names known to everyone in Ireland were mangled by hapless census takers or certificate registrars who wrote Burk for Burke, or Dailey for Daly. Prefixes like “Mc” or “Mac” (“son of”) were dropped, or “O'” (“grandson of”) was added. “Mc” was sometimes spelled “M'” in documents, as in M’Mahon instead of McMahon. Be ready to search variants with wildcards, and to accept that there was no original perfect spelling of your family name!
• Middle names: In rural Ireland, among the tenant farmers (in other words, not the Ascendancy or the gentry), middle names were uncommon. Many families followed a traditional naming system (firstborn son after the paternal grandfather, firstborn daughter after the maternal grandmother, etc) which often produced three or four first cousins with the same name. In Ireland, they each had a nickname so they could be told apart, and that worked fine in a small community. But in a city like New York, you may find four immigrants in the same period with the same name, with no way of knowing which one is your ancestor! In that case, it’s helpful to do a process of elimination, with quick temporary genealogies of each “candidate” until they are eliminated as a family member. And look for middle names in the children of immigrants!
• Town and city directories can be valuable resources if for example you know that your ancestor was a grocer or a blacksmith. Sometimes, you can locate siblings or aunts & uncles living at the same address or next door.
• Birth vs. baptism dates: If a baptism register date and civil registration birthdate differ for the same person, it is more likely the baptism date is the correct one. Irish parents baptized children as quickly as possible after birth.
• Irish newspapers may or may not have information nuggets, particularly from the 1870s onward.
• DNA matches may be helpful to connect with recent cousins (i.e. the genealogical period), but keep in mind that the thousands of very distant matches won’t help at all, as far enough back parents may themselves have been related; rural Ireland was insular!

Some historical context

It is estimated that some 80 million people living people around the world have Irish ancestry. Why so many? To understand why, we need to briefly review the recent history of the “land of saints and scholars”.

Ireland was dominated by its stronger neighbor for centuries until hard-won independence came in 1921, at the price of partition of the island into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and the Civil War which ended in 1923.

Emigrants in the 17th and 18th centuries were mostly Catholic military officers and men who sought military careers in continental Europe because of religious discrimination. Then, in the early 19th century, many Ulstermen, skilled in trades, started emigrating to the United States. At this time England first “transported” convicts to Australia, many of them Irish (and convicted for very minor offenses).

As the Industrial Revolution and empire building transformed Britain in the mid-19th century, Ireland remained mostly rural except for the large cities of Dublin and Cork and the industrial port of Belfast. This was due in part to Ireland’s limited coal reserves, but also to disinterest on the part of absentee British landowners throughout the island. The Acts of Union 1800 which united the kingdoms and merged the Parliaments in 1801, did however bring the (now lost) censuses starting in 1821 and the Irish Ordnance Survey which mapped and documented the place names of Ireland from 1824. Ireland in the first half of the 19th century had a population boom.

However, the Great Hunger — an Gorta Mór — which began in 1845 and continued for several years killed at least a million Irish people and sent up to a million and a half others, mostly Catholic, to England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and of course the United States. Most of these emigrants never returned to their home villages in the old country, and connections were lost. Even today, Ireland’s population is lower than on the eve of the famine.

Some of the Catholic parish registers were lost; many are quite difficult to read. However, the single greatest loss for historians and genealogists was the Record Treasury explosion and fire in Dublin during the civil war in 1922, when seven centuries of Irish documents — including most of the 19th century census returns — went up in flames.

Civil registration began islandwide for non-Catholic marriages in 1845 and Catholic marriages and all births and deaths in 1864, and fortunately most of those records do survive. Marriages are rich in information, as parent’s names are often mentioned, providing clues to go back another generation.

Some Irish emigrants farmed in their new country of residence, but most turned their backs on rural life and took on work others didn’t want: on the docks or the railroads, in the mines or in the factories, on city streets as firemen or policemen.

Irish genealogy resources

Here is a list of resources for Irish genealogy which will help you with your research. If you know of a good resource we missed, let us know in the comments!

• Ancestry.com. Geneanet’s parent company has a number of collections of interest available at their Ireland portal, including the surviving 1901 and 1911 censuses and BMD records (both available elsewhere). Did your people emigrate to New York City? Search the Emmigrant Savings Bank records!
• FamilySearch. The wiki page has an Ireland portal and offers a number of collections worth searching.
• Cyndi’s List. Always an excellent starting point for a roundup of available resources.
• Irish Ancestors. John Grenham’s subscription site is a vital resource for learning about Irish names and places. His last name heatmap is particularly useful for unusual last names. Links to other repositories streamline research.
• Barry Griffin. Barry has created very useful last name heatmaps derived from the 1901 and 1911 census returns. Your people may have emigrated, but often the firstborn son and daughter stayed. New in 2022, some common name variants are automatically searched, and you can search by a specific variant too. Compare to the Geneanet last name heatmap, generated from our members’ trees — you may turn up new information!
• irishgenealogy.ie. This free government-run site is the go-to destination for indexed civil BMD and church records. Learn about the Tithe Applotment Books (1823 to 1838) and Griffith’s Valuation (1847 to 1864), two property tax surveys which are useful census substitutes. And take time to read John Grenham’s very useful overview of Irish genealogy [PDF]!
• LibraryIreland. This well-rounded site has material about Irish history, genealogy, and culture.
• Ancestor Network. This company provides professional genealogy and probate research and publishes useful resources for researching Irish genealogy.
• RootsIreland. This is a subscription-only site run by the Irish Family History Foundation (IFHF), which regroups the Irish genealogy centers which first transcribed parish registers in 1984. A transcript-only site, it can however be useful to locate the needle in a haystack which is the parish register reference of a baptism or marriage. After obtaining this information, the register can easily be looked up at the NLI or, if not yet digitized, can point you to where the register is stored.
• Irish Family History Centre. This organization of professional researchers offers free resources for irish genealogy and publishes a genealogy magazine, Irish Lives Remembered, available for download (the latest issue is here).
• General Register Office of Northern Ireland. GRONI holds birth, death, and marriage records for the six counties of Northern Ireland.
• Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. PRONI is Northern Ireland’s archive repository. Archives are searchable and there is a family and local history records portal. New historical records such as church registers are added often.
• Irish Newspaper Archives. This subscription site has over six million pages of historical and recent newspapers.
• Emerald Ancestors. This subscription site focuses on genealogy records for Northern Ireland.
• Ask About Ireland. This site provides indexes, digitized pages, and maps of Richard Griffith’s Primary Valuation of Tenements, a property tax survey which is a key census substitute for Irish genealogy. See also the Thom’s Directories database.
• National Library of Ireland. The NLI has surviving Catholic parish registers online, however they are unindexed — so if you don’t already know the parish and timeframe you want, you may never get through the thousands of pages. Read the informative introduction, then use indexes available elsewhere to identify the parish and date, then return and look up the page! Also of interest: the Office of the Chief Herald, responsible for the granting and confirming of arms to individuals and corporate bodies, with records back to the mid-16th century.
• National Archives of Ireland. The National Archives has a genealogy portal worth inspecting. Don’t miss the 1901 and 1911 census search, and stay tuned for the 1926 census!
• Irish Manuscripts Commission. This organization has begun digitizing its past publications, transcripts of 17th to 19th century documents, as searchable PDFs. Although there is not a large number available, it is worth checking if your people’s county of origin is among them.
• Association for Church Archives of Ireland. Founded in 1980, the ACAI has resources concerning religious denominations in Ireland, for example a list of Religious Congregation & Order Abbreviations.
• Ulster Historical Foundation. This site has useful information if your people came from the north of Ireland.
• IrelandXO. This site with useful information about Irish genealogy has a well-written summary of the Irish naming conventions tradition. Although it’s never guaranteed that a family adhered to the tradition, when there is evidence that was the case, the convention can help you guess the names of grandparents or aunts and uncles from the names of parents and grandchildren.
• Townlands in Ireland. This database is a must for understanding the peculiar system of land divisions in Ireland, from county level to each of the 60,000 townlands. If you can link your ancestors to a townland, you are close to breaking a brick wall, because there is often offline information to be found in the nearest library, in books about the place, and even in living memory of the locals!
• Kerry Library Local History and Archives Department. The Great Hunger was severe in Co.Kerry and many inhabitants took ship at Queenstown (Cobh), the port of Cork City, for passage to New York. If your people were from Kerry, the library’s archivists may be able to assist you.
• Irish Genealogy Toolkit. Genealogist and author Claire Santry’s site is packed with useful tips and information for Irish genealogy.
• Irish Jewish Genealogical Society. Were your Irish people Jewish? This is the site for you!
• Ulster Ancestry. This site has passenger lists, directories and headstone transcriptions from Northern Ireland.
• Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland. If you know your people were Presbyterian, you will want to visit this resource.
• Eddie’s Extracts. Edward Connolly has transcribed birth, marriage and death extracts from historical Irish newspapers for many years.
• Fáilte Romhat. This site by John Hayes has a number of transcriptions and some digitized book pages, with a particular focus on Co.Cork.
• The Dublin Port Archive. Records of dockworkers in Dublin came onine last year. Read our article, Exploring the Dublin Port Archive’s Name Book!
• Registry of Deeds Index Project. This volunteer-driven site provides finding aids for the island-wide records held at the Registry of Deeds in Dublin. As of December 2022, over half a million records have been indexed, with links to the registry scans hosted by FamilySearch.
• Digital Repository of Ireland. The DRI has a number of digitized photos, documents, and expositions of the humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage data. If you know your ancestor’s town, try a search and see what comes up!
• The Archives of the Church of Ireland. This site has a genealogy page, online parish records, and the Anglican Record Project.
• Irish Genealogical Society International. The IGSI, a Minnesota (US) based association, offers a number of resources for searching your Irish ancestors and publishes a quarterly called The Septs.
• GENUKI. This volunteer-driven site dedicated to UK and Ireland genealogy has an Ireland page with a detailed overview of Irish records and resources.
• Dublin Cemeteries Trust. There is a burial search available.
• Defence Forces Ireland Military Archives. Did your ancestor serve in Ireland’s military? Pension records may have useful information!
• Forces War Records. A sister site of Geneanet in the Ancestry group, Forces War Records has many records of Irishmen who served in the United Kingdom’s armed forces.
• The Irish Emigration Museum. EPIC in Dublin has resources for teachers and students, including a downloadable History-at-Home pack for Genealogy.
• Irish Genealogical Research Society. Founded in 1936, the IGRS has a wealth of resources for Irish genealogy, many exclusive.
• Facebook groups. If you use this social media platform, be aware that there are a number of popular groups of interest for Irish genealogy, history, and folklore, including some specific to a county or area in Ireland or for descendants in a country of immigration. For example, “Irish Genealogy”, “Irish Folklore & History”, “County Kerry, Ireland DNA & Genealogy”, “Irish Heritage Quebec”, and many other groups have knowledgeable and helpful members. As always, be sure you agree to each group’s rules.
• Irish Geneaography. This site by genealogist Ruth Mathewson offers insight into Irish genealogy and the varied sources for genealogists.
• Accredited Genealogists Ireland. The AGI is a helpful resource for those seeking professional assistance in Irish genealogy. In recent news, a partnership with City Colleges has been formed to offer a diploma in family history research.
• Documenting Ireland Parliament, People and Migration. This completed project of Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster, and Mellon Centre for Migration Studies is an online virtual archive of documents and sources relating to the Ireland’s history and its migration experience from the 18th to 20th centuries.
• University College Dublin National Folklore Collection. Visit this page for manuscript and audiovisual resources of Ireland’s rich folklore.

Did we miss any resources? Please let us know in the comments! And don’t hesitate to ask for help in our forums where we have an Ireland section. Geneanet members are helpful and questions are monitored by support!