How important are Parish Registers in Irish Family Research?

When searching for your ancestors one of the first places to visit are parish registers. This applies regardless of the religious background of your family as all churches kept records, to various degrees, of births, marriages and deaths. As the Established (State) Church from 1537 to 1870, there was a legal obligation on the Church of Ireland to keep records from 1643, although many rural parishes ignored the law for another hundred years.

The parishes who ignored the directive to have their parish registers sent to Dublin for official storage, in the Public Records Office, were the lucky ones as their parish records survived the fire in Four Courts in 1922. In West Cork, the Vicar of Kilgarriffe (Clonakilty) obeyed orders, which leaves a huge void for genealogists and families trying to create a family tree.

Several rural parishes like, Kilmeen and Ballymoney, kept their registers locally and are now a wonderful source of genealogical information. Kilmeen, for example, have baptism and marriage records from 1806 and burials from 1844. The registers that survive are stored in the Representative Church Body Library in Churchtown, Dublin. It is also worth noting that birth, marriage and death records for minority denominations, such as Presbyterians, Methodists and other dissenters are stored in the Church of Ireland Registers.

The relaxation of the Penal Laws, followed by Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the building of magnificent churches brought a new confidence to the Catholic faithful. With the population doubling, to eight million from 1800 to 1845, we find most parishes recording baptisms and marriages from 1820 onward, which is a treasure store for genealogists and even better that most are now digitised at www.irishgenealogy.ie. All parishes in the Diocese of Cork and Ross are digitised on this website, but if your ancestors came from Cloyne Diocese you may find them in the National Library archives.

While it is wonderful to use modern technology to uncover your heritage and ancestry, it cannot compare to actually browsing through the original parish registers, and uncover the baptism entry for your great-great grandfather entered in Latin with a quill or steel nib.