Research in Ireland Part 1: Roman Catholic Parish Records

 If you have Irish immigrants in your ancestry and have attempted to trace them back to Ireland, you already know the challenges of this quest. Many Americans who have Irish lines only know that someone came from Ireland at some time. Others are more fortunate to have found family records, immigration records or vital records that offer some clues as to where their ancestors lived in Ireland and when they might have emigrated. But for the majority of us who descend from poor Irish men and women who spent much of their lives struggling as new immigrants, we find they left few records. On the US census, often an ancestor’s record shows only the country of origin as Ireland, and we yearn for at least the name of the county.

         Landing at Ellis Island, Illus. in: Quarantine sketches. The Maltine Company, [1902, p. 25],  LC-USZ62-12595, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 

Before we dive in to a tool to help us identify the areas of Ireland where our ancestors may have lived, it is imperative to understand how the country is organized.

File:Ireland map modern.png. (2020, September 13). Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. Retrieved 20:40, August 30, 2021 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ireland_map_modern.png&oldid=457463988

While we have states and counties in America that form our basic municipal organization, Ireland has several more divisions besides the county level, both civil and religious. Wesley Johnston explains the province/county divisions  very clearly and provides excellent maps.

After the county level, the next division is the Roman Catholic diocese. In Ireland, the organization of the dioceses precede the partition, so some are only in the North or in the Republic while others span both areas.

Within the diocese is the parish, and there are two types: civil and  ecclesiastical,  the latter  of which is subdivided into Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland (Protestant.)

Two other divisions, the Barony  and the Poor Law Union  will not be part of this post but can be very helpful to researchers.

We now turn our attention to a record collection that may be of help in your search, no matter where you are in your knowledge of the location of your ancestors in Ireland. This record set is the “Ireland Roman Catholic Parish Records”  at the National Library of Ireland (NLI.) 

[National Library of Ireland]. 1930-1950

You can view the records at this site, but they are not transcribed and can be difficult to read.  Fortunately, the genealogy program Findmypast 

used by permission of Findmypast

 has transcribed many of the records and makes them searchable free of charge (you do need to set up an account.) Here is the page to browse the Parish records:

You are also able to search by surname in each of the three types of records: baptism, marriage and death. Later in the post, I will demonstrate a search of the baptismal records.

The company describes the full collection as:

“ …over 10 million Catholic family records …Original church registers of baptisms, marriages, burials, communions, confirmations and more will reveal some of the most important details in your family's history. Every county and over 1,000 parishes in Ireland are covered.”

Before we do a search of the Parish Records to give you a taste of the process, here’s a tip: if you are new to Findmypast or want a refresher on how to search the records, I suggest you watch Jen Baldwin’s youtube video. 

I decided to begin my Parish Record search in Findmypast with my paternal great grandfather’s surname of Carney.  I have included screen shots (by permission of Findmpast) from the program to guide you through my search process.

When you sign in to Findmypast, this page appears:

As seen above, I chose the "Quick Links" section to search. Under that heading, I narrowed my search to "Parish Records" which brought me to this page:

As you can see above, I started from the left and narrowed my records search to "Parish Baptisms." Then under Who, I typed "Carney" as my name search. Under Where there is a pull-down menu, and I selected "Ireland." And I received 4,423 results! I needed to narrow my search parameters.

The program allows you drill down further into the location you want to search. I discussed my counties of interest in Ireland in an earlier post. I would narrow my Ireland search to Tyrone County. When I typed "Tyrone," the words "Northern Ireland" were added by the program.

 See my changes on the page below:

If you look at the third box under Where, you find the mileage register.  I moved it to 20 which means 20 miles out from the center of the county. 

These new parameters brought the total results from 4,423 to 28, a workable number. I wanted to find out when the earliest baptism was. On the blue bar above the results, I clicked on the Year column heading. This sorts the data  chronologically from the earliest date; in this case, from 1779-1880. 

As I looked at the 28 Carney baptisms, I focused on the Location column heading. I noticed that 17 (61%) were in the diocese of Clogher. This kind of cluster bears more scrutiny. Looking more closely at the Clogher parishes where Carneys were baptized, I noticed that Carolus Carney's family were in Aughalurcher Parish. Again, this name was familiar. In another record group, the Catholic Qualification Rolls, (I will write another post on this source) I found a Denis McElroy, one of the Carney cohort families described in my post of August 18, 2013, living in Aughalurcher Parish also. And even more exciting is that both Carolus and Denis were from the same small village of Maguiresbridge! Another interesting link among the Carney baptism locations is that 9 out of the 28 were from Enniskillen , 8 miles from Maguiresbridge.

In conclusion, my goals in this post were to introduce the Ireland Roman Catholic Parish Records and to show how to search them with Findmypast. I also wanted to show how a researcher can put the findings from different sources together to come up with new connections.