All posts in Irish Genealogy Research

Irish genealogy speaks three languages at once — administrative English, register Latin, and anglicised Irish — and half of every beginner’s confusion is vocabulary. This glossary translates the lot. Bookmark it, and come back whenever a record says something strange. Terms are grouped by where…

Between the Famine and the founding of the Free State, Ireland exported people on a scale no European nation has matched — millions of departures, most of them one-way. The paradox for researchers: the country they left kept almost no record of their going. The…

On 30 June 1922, in the opening days of the Irish Civil War, the Public Record Office at the Four Courts burned — and with it, seven centuries of Ireland’s documented memory. It is the disaster every Irish researcher has heard of, usually in the…

“County Cork” is not an address. It is half a million ancestors deep and eighty miles wide — and it is what most families remember. The townland is the address: one of Ireland’s sixty-one thousand small named places, and the single most valuable fact in…

Ireland’s nineteenth-century censuses are ash — but between 1847 and 1864, a tax survey wrote down the name of nearly every household head in the country, townland by townland. Richard Griffith was valuing property; he accidentally built the census substitute an entire research tradition now…

Two snapshots survive of every household in Ireland: Sunday night, 31 March 1901, and Sunday night, 2 April 1911. Everything the nineteenth century counted before that is gone — which makes these two census years not just useful but precious, and mercifully, completely free. This…

Before the State counted the Irish, the Church christened them. For the decades before civil registration — and for the great majority of the population — the Catholic parish register is the only document on earth recording that your ancestor was born, married, and belonged…

On the first of January 1864, every birth, marriage, and death on the island of Ireland became the State’s business — and the genealogist’s inheritance. From that date forward, your family’s vital events were written into civil registers that survive, complete, to this day. Civil…

If Irish research has a front door, it is IrishGenealogy.ie — the State’s own free portal, holding the civil record indexes for the whole island and, for older events, the register images themselves. Most family mysteries that can be solved at all begin unravelling here….