Kearney and Young Family History

Leading Family History website Findmypast, today announced that they will be granting four days of free access to their entire collection of more than 114 million Irish records, the largest available anywhere online. From Thursday 15th September to Sunday 18th September, all Irish birth, marriage, death, census, social history, immigration and military records available on Findmypast will be completely free to explore.

This is to celebrate the landmark publication of more than 3 million historic Irish records released in association with the National Archives of Ireland and Family Search International which I mentioned yesterday. The release consists of a wide range of documents including original wills, lists of Catholics who swore loyalty to the crown or converted to Protestantism, land valuation records and merchant navy crew lists. The records date back to pre-famine Ireland and will be completely free to search forever.

Spanning over 220 years of Irish history from 1701 to 1922, the release is comprised of four highly valuable National Archives of Ireland collections including:

Original Will Registers 1858-1920
Qualification and Convert Rolls 1701 – 1845
Valuation Office books 1824-1856
Merchant Navy Crew lists 1857-1922

This is the first time these important National Archives of Ireland collections have been fully indexed with digitized images of the original papers linked online. All four collections are fully searchable.

Excellent news for those of us with Irish ancestry as this week historic birth, marriage, and death registers for Ireland were made available online at IrishGenealogy.ie.

Not all Registers are currently available. The General Register Office are updating records of Marriages dating back to 1845 and Deaths dating back to 1864 – these will be added later.

Universal civil registration began in 1864, but non-Catholic marriages were only recorded from 1845 onwards. The registers that are online cover the whole of Ireland for the period up to 1921, but exclude the six counties of Northern Ireland after that date. According to Claire Santry’s Irish Genealogy News there are a total of 12.5 million entries online.

You can currently search the following:
BIRTHS: 1864 to 1915
MARRIAGES: 1882 to 1940
DEATHS: 1891 to 1965

Leading family history site, Findmypast, has announced today the online release of over 10 million Irish Catholic Parish Registers as part of their ongoing commitment to making Irish family history easier and more accessible than ever before. Fully indexed for the first time, the registers form one of the most important record collections for Irish family history and are free to search forever.

Spanning over 200 years of Ireland’s history from 1671-1900, the Irish Catholic Parish Registers contain over 40 million names from over 1,000 parishes and cover 97% of the entire island of Ireland, both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
This is the first time that National Library of Ireland’s collection of Irish Catholic Registers has been fully indexed with images to the original documents linked online. The records can now be searched by name, year and place, allowing relatives and historians the opportunity to make all important links between generations with the baptism records and between families with the marriage registers.
The indexing of these important documents also allows researchers to witness the devastating effects of the Great Famine (1845-1852) first hand. Using the records to examine baptism rates in pre and post Famine Ireland has revealed that the number of children baptised across the whole of Ireland dropped by more 50% in the decade that followed. Across all 32 counties, 2,408,694 baptisms were recorded from 1835-1844, while 1,109,062 baptisms were recorded between 1851 and 1860, a difference of more than 1,299,000 baptisms.

The records also reveal the worst affected regions, with counties Limerick, Wexford, Roscommon and Kilkenny seeing the most dramatic drops in baptism rates.

To celebrate the release of this essential collection, Findmypast is also making its entire archive of over 110 million Irish records, the largest available anywhere online, FREE from 9am Tuesday 1st March to 9am on Tuesday 8th March. Findmypast is home to the most comprehensive online collection of Irish family history records with millions of exclusive records, published in partnership with The National Archives of Ireland, The National Archives UK, and a host of other local, county and national archives.