Saturday 16 March 2024

TheGenealogist uploads more than 3million Irish records

Also getting in on St Patrick's Day celebrations is TheGenealogist database. Principally known for its extensive collections covering England and Wales, TheGenealogist has extended its Irish and, to a lesser extent, Scottish coverage recently.

This week's releases aee more than three million records join the database. They fall into two categories: parish registers and probate, as follows:

Irish Catholic Parish Records: Some 1,769,007 individuals have been indexed from the Baptism and Marriage registers for more than 80 County Tipperary parishes. Additionally, Baptism and Marriage registers in four County Carlow parishes have made their way into the county's existing collection. This means the database now has significant collection of parish registers for Counties Carlow, Kildare, Laois, Tipperary and Wexford. You can see the list of available parishes, and the dates of the registers, on this page.

Irish Wills: Six probate collections have been released, making available a further 1,263,399 records. They are listed below:

  • Dublin Will and Grant Books 1272-1858
  • Calendar of Wills and Administrations 1858-1922
  • Irish Will Indexes 1484-1858
  • Prerogative and Diocesan Copies of Wills and Indexes 1596-1858
  • Will Registers 1858-1900
  • Soldiers’ Wills 1914-1918

If you're interested to see what TheGenealogist offers Irish genealogists, you might like to take up the offer of a free trial. Click the logo above to find out more.

FindMyPast Ireland adds three record-sets and three directories

This year's St Patrick's Day delivery from FindMyPast.ie comprises three new 18th-century record sets and a significant expansion of the existing Directories collection. These additions to the Irish database tot up to fewer than 8,000 short of a cool one million records.

18th century census substitutes

The originals of this trio of record sets were lost in the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland. Fortunately for Irish family historians, antiquarian and professional genealogist Tenison Groves had spent the previous twenty-odd years transcribing many of the documents that went up in flames. The transcriptions are held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and have been digitised by other suppliers. Their arrival in the FindMyPast collection will help many researchers. In chronological order, the record sets are:

Ireland, Census of Protestant Householders 1740: The 15,957 individuals recorded in this listing are arranged by their parish and county. Geographical coverage includes the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal, Down and Tyrone and in some instances include the townland of residence. The purpose of the 'census' is not certain, but may have been connected with the Hearth Tax. See PRONI's article, here, for further background.

Ireland, 1766 Religious Census: These 20,505 transcriptions include returns from the six counties now in Northern Ireland and fifteen counties in the Republic of Ireland, and are arranged by parish. Geographical coverage is far from complete and the information collected is far from consistent; in some parishes, only a headcount was taken of each commuinity, while in others the names of the heads of household were noted. See PRONI's article, here, for further background.

Ireland, 1775 Dissenters' Petition: Presbyterian congregations across Ireland petitioned the Dublin parliament to repeal laws that restricted political, civic and professional postitions/occupations to communicant members of the Established Church of Ireland. Some members of the Established Church were also signatories. The petitions consist of dissenters' names categorized by parish, congregation, town, neighbourhood, or, in one case, barony. This small collection of 4,683 records includes parishes in Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal, Down and Tyrone. For more details, see PRONI's article here.

Belfast & Ulster Directories

FindMyPast's existing collection of Belfast and Ulster Directories has been extended with the addition of three more titles and more than 951,000 names. It means that this collection now consists of 58 Belfast and/or Ulster directory titles spanning 1831 to 1900 and offer a total of 2,874,586 indexed name entries. (View the full list of titles here.) Both transcriptions and original page images can be explored to locate your ancestors by name, residence, occupation, and year.

Sample entries from the 1865 edition of The Belfast And Province Of Ulster Directory


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Friday 15 March 2024

Free access to MyHeritage's Irish Collection until Monday

For St Patrick's Day, MyHeritage has opened up its entire Irish collection of nearly 14 million records.

These are held in 104 record sets including censuses, census substitutes, births and marriages, wills and a good spread of publications and directories. It's a collection thiat is growing but in my opinion it is still quite a way from being a go-to database for Irish researchers.

However, for any family historians making their first foray into Irish records, it might be worth a free weekend dip.

You can find brief details and links to each of the record sets in the Ireland catalogue. Select one and enter your search criteria. You'll then be prompted to create a free account. Go ahead. It's free and doesn't require you to hand over any financial information.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Big discounts from IrishNewspaperArchives mark St Patrick's Day

With St Patrick's weekend just around the corner, here's an opportunity to grab yourself a tidy discount from the Dublin-based IrishNewspaperArchive.com. Two offers are available as follows:
  • Gold Membership: 35% off monthly and annual subscriptions
  • Silver Membership: 30% off monthly and annual subsriptions

Gold membership includes full access to the main Irish Newspapers Archive, which holds some 158 titles, AND full access to its unique Radical Newspapers Archive, which holds 103 titles.

Silver membership includes full access to the main Irish Newspaper Archive, which holds some 158 titles.

The archives offer more than ten million pages of newspaper content from titles published and circulated across the island, some of them dating back to 1738.

Archival content is regularly updated, and new titles added. Here's a list of the updates and new releases over the past five months:

Connaught Journal 1793–1828
Celtic Times 1887
Rights of the Irishmen 1792
The Press 1797–1798
Sligo Weekender 2005–2008
Belfast Newsletter 2006
Andersonstown News 1972–2000
Post 1955,1958-1959
Evening Echo 2001–2002
Evening Telegraph 1916–1919

The generous savings will be available until Sunday 24 March.

Click the image to type in the promo code and view the discounted price for your choice of Membership, or, to view the list of titles available in each archive, click here.


Monday 11 March 2024

PRONI's Reading Room closed for six weeks

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has introduced some temporary changes to the in-person service provided at its offices in Belfast's Titanic Quarter.

To facilitate some construction work to the building, the Reading Room has been closed and will remain so until about the middle of April.

Researchers visiting the site will still be able to access original records in the PRONI Search Room and, although they've been relocated within that room, the self-service microfilms will be available as usual.

If you're planning to visit the site over the next few weeks, be sure to check this PRONI webpage where any important changes to the above will be posted.

Latest updates/releases for English, Scottish and Welsh genealogy

Below is a two-week summary of newly-released and updated genealogy collections for England, Scotland and Wales from the major family history database providers. (For previous list, see 16 February blogpost.)

My regular summary of releases and updates relating to British collections is designed to help researchers whose Irish ancestors migrated, temporarily or permanently, to England, Scotland or Wales.

By default, it will also be useful to anyone carrying out research in those three nations, regardless of the origin of their ancestors.

The figures in parentheses in the New Collections section are the numbers of records (or images, if browse-only) in the new record set.

Unless otherwise stated, the figures in parentheses in the Updated Collections section reflect the number of records added to the collection in the recent update. In some instances, the supplier has not made this figure available so the figure is the new total. Where two figures are given, the first is the number of additions, the second is the new total.

Please note that I don't usually include updates of fewer than 1,000 records.


NEW COLLECTIONS


Ancestry

BritishNewspaperArchive and FindMyPast

FindMyPast

MyHeritage

UPDATED COLLECTIONS


Ancestry

FindMyPast

FreeBMD

TheGenealogist

Some of the above content contains affiliate links. This means I may earn a small commission if you buy via these links. This does not affect the price you pay as a consumer, but it does contribute to keeping Irish Genealogy News online. See Advertising Disclosure tab above.

The Spring edition of Irish Roots Magazine has been published

The latest edition of Irish Roots magazine, Ireland's only independent magazine dedicated to Irish genealogy, has been published.

It is, as always, filled with helpful guidance, informative features and all the latest news and developments to help researchers discover more about their ancestral heritage, whether their family remained on the island or emigrated to near or distant new homes.

You'll find the following articles in the new issue:

- Visiting the UCG Archives: The James Joyce Library
- Local resources for family history research: County Mayo
- Mayo's connection to Saint Thomas More
- St Patrick's Day in Holyoke, Massachusetts
- Genealogy tips from the IGRS
- What's New? Review of latest record releases
- Surnames of County Mayo
- Tracing my ancestors from Wisconsin to Westmeath Pt2
- Australian Connections: Irish in the North End
- Using Irish naming conventions to research
- Overcoming the pitfalls of online church records
- DNA research: Frequent queries answered

Irish Roots is published quarterly and is available in print and digital formats, in single issues or on subscription.

To find out more, and to download a sample copy of this new edition, click the cover image.


Friday 8 March 2024

Records from 15 more Cork graveyards join SkibbHeritage database

Skibbereen Heritage's excellent Cork Graveyard Database has been updated with another tranche of burial register records. This upload of 27,000 records brings the total number of burials in the collection to 82,702, while the number of cemeteries and burial grounds covered has risen to 128.

Most of the deaths occurred in the 20th century and early 21st. Burials in the last ten years are not included.

The records have been made available to Skibbereen Heritage Centre by Cork County Council, who are now responsible for each of the sites and hold the original registers.

This latest tranche of records relate to burials from the following graveyards:

The updated database includes records from 128 graveyards
  • St Mary's Passage West
  • Ballyclough
  • Burnfoot
  • Banteer
  • Killingley
  • Carrigaline St Mary's
  • St John's Coachford
  • North Kilmurry near Berrings
  • Kilmurry St Mary's
  • Marmullane, Kilmueey
  • Matehy
  • Aghabulloge
  • Garrycloyne, All Saints
  • Dunbullogue
  • Kilfauygnabeg, Old Graveyard

Having extended the geograpahical spread of this collection, the West Cork Graveyard Database has been renamed the Cork Graveyard Database.

Huge congratulations and thanks to the SkibbHeritage team for their ongoing hard work in creating this wonderful and free collection.

Four new record-sets join Ancestry's Ireland collection

Ancestry has uploaded four new Irish collections to its database:

Ireland, Guinness Employee Records, 1799-1939
Of the four, this is the collection that has the potential to unlock genealogical information about your ancestor if he or she was employed by Guinness.

The 204,605 records can include the following information for each individual: name, age and gender, marital status, date and place of birth, marriage date, employment and death dates, street address, occupation and place of work, spouse's name, age and birthdate, and the names, ages and relationships of up to four relatives.

The collection contains many different types of records: wages, authorization logs, next of kin records, and how and when a person worked for the company.

Ireland, Guinness Trade Ledgers, 1860-1960
This record set contains images of trade ledgers produced by Guinness Brewery employees in Dublin and England between 1860 and 1960. The ledgers record sales to trade customers, typically pubs and general grocers.

These entries sometimes show details of individual orders and their value, but may also record the deaths of publicans, and the names of their successors (see image).

In total, there are 1,452,426 records in this collection.

Ireland, Dublin Coopers Society and Brewers' Guild Records, 1702-1945
This small index of just 276 names can be used to confirm whether your ancestor was a member of the Coopers and Brewers Guild in Dublin at a specific point in time. It can also provide details of your ancestor's residence while a Guild member and, sometimes, a date of death or even exclusion.

Ireland, 2nd and 3rd Edition Map, 1899-1905
This collection contains images of second- and third-edition Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland produced between 1899 and 1905.

The maps use a scale in which one inch equals a mile, and they were based on previous maps that used a larger scale. They show details of cities and villages, roads, railroads, and topographical information and can be useful in family history when borders might have shifted over time or the names of places have changed. Comparing maps of a similar scale allows you to accurately place your ancestors.

UPDATE, 9 March: Ancestry has announced that the Guiness collections will be free to search and view until 22 March 2024.