Tracing Your Irish Roots

The most valuable research happens before you land, in your own family. Irish records are organised by place, and the single most useful thing you can arrive with is a specific location: not just 'Ireland' or even a county, but ideally a parish or townland (the small traditional land division that Irish addresses still hang on). Gather names, approximate dates of birth, marriage and death, and the religion of your ancestors, since records are split along denominational lines.

Old letters, photographs, family bibles, and the memories of elderly relatives are gold. An emigrant's records in their destination country, a US or Australian census, a ship's passenger list, a death certificate, will often name the Irish county or town you need to unlock the trail back home.

Every Irish family historian runs into the same wall, so it is worth knowing about upfront. In 1922, during the Civil War, the Public Record Office in Dublin was destroyed by fire, taking with it most of Ireland's nineteenth-century census returns. The censuses from 1861 to 1891 had already been pulped by the government, and the bulk of the 1821 to 1851 returns burned in the fire.

The practical result is that for most of the 1800s there is no census to consult, which is exactly the period many people are trying to research. Irish genealogy is therefore built on substitutes: church records, land valuations, and civil registration filling the gap the census would have covered.

Two official, free websites do most of the heavy lifting. The first is irishgenealogy.ie, the state's genealogy site, which holds the civil registration records: the official state records of births, marriages and deaths, with index details and images of the historical certificates. Civil registration began in 1864 for all births and deaths (and from 1845 for non-Catholic marriages), so this is the backbone for the later 1800s onward.

The second is the National Archives census site, where the two surviving complete censuses, 1901 and 1911, are searchable and viewable for free. These are a wonderful resource: they list every member of a household on census night with ages, occupations, religion, and birthplace, and they are often the first solid record people find.

To get back before civil registration, church and land records are the key substitutes. The National Library of Ireland has digitised its collection of Catholic parish registers, the baptism and marriage records of the Catholic majority, and put them online free at registers.nli.ie, covering roughly the 1740s to the 1880s. For Catholic ancestors, this is often the deepest you can reach.

For land, Griffith's Valuation is the great census substitute. Published between 1847 and 1864, it was a survey of every house and landholding in the country for tax purposes, and it names the occupier of virtually every property in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. It is free to search at the Ask About Ireland site, and it can place your family in a specific townland in the decades around the Famine.

If you want to research on the ground, Dublin has the main repositories: the National Archives of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland both have public genealogy advisory services, and the General Register Office holds the civil records. Around the country, local county heritage and genealogy centres hold records specific to their area and can do paid look-ups, which is often the fastest route in a region you cannot easily visit.

For the emotional side of the story rather than the paperwork, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin tells the history of Irish emigration, and has an on-site family history centre. Many visitors pair a day in the archives with a trip to the townland itself, which is frequently the real point of the whole exercise.