Catholic Church and the National Library of Ireland will put parish records online

[rug]

By Michael Kelly
Catholic News Service | December 2, 2014

DUBLIN — The Catholic Church and the National Library of Ireland have partnered to make almost 400,000 images of Catholic parish register microfilms available online for free.

A National Library of Ireland statement called the records the single most important source of information on Irish family history before the 1901 census. Dating from the 1740s to the 1880s, they cover nearly 1,100 parishes throughout the island of Ireland and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records.

“Most census records from this period were destroyed in the Four Courts fire of 1922, so these parish registers are the most comprehensive surviving source of information on Irish families in the 1700s and 1800s,” said Colette O’Flaherty, head of special collections at the National Library of Ireland.

At a Dec. 1 launch of the project in Dublin, she said she believed that the digitization “will be of huge assistance to those who wish to research their family history.”

http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/12/02/church-national-library-of-ireland-to-make-parish-records-free-online/

[No Vested Interest]

1. I hope I live long enough to see it completed.

It's tough when your surname is the second most common name in the country, and the ancestor's first name is that of the island's patron saint.

This could be cross-posted in ancestry/genealogy.

[rug]

2. My grandmother came from Cork when she was 3 in the 1890s.

She died in a psychiatric hospital in New York 70 years later. I've always wondered about how and why her family emigrated.

There's a practical reason too. There's a law in Ireland that grandchildren of emigrants can obtain Irish citizenship. Since Ireland is part of the EU, that means restriction free travel. One of these days I'll have to look her up.

[No Vested Interest]

3. You likely have cousins still in the area.

If genealogists can turn up Kennedy cousins and Obama relatives, I'm sure yours are locatable as well, even more so when these records become available.

Mine emigrated ca 1820 from Co. Tyrone, and records of Catholic marriages and baptisms before that time period would have been undercover, to say the least, so I would not qualify for dual citizenship, but that's okay. The British were a brutal people in their Reformation fervor.

[Kingofalldems]

4. Nice, I can look up my ggrandparents.