Online parish records will boost global ancestry searches

Family history searches should become much easier when records going back nearly 300 years from almost 1,100 parishes go online for people of Irish descent to see for free.

By next summer, the National Library of Ireland (NLI) expects to have completed the work of digitising and uploading the baptism, marriage and other records which it currently holds.

While they have been available to view on microfilm since the 1970s, their availability online will mean geneaologists can conduct their searches from the comfort of home or office anywhere in the world, instead of having to travel to the NLI in Dublin.

Almost 400,000 digital images from 1,091 Catholic parishes have been created already, and are now being uploaded to the free dedicated website which is due to be launched next year.

“Anyone tracing Irish family history will be able to access this site from anywhere in the world and search for the parish in which they are interested. They will be able to see a list of registers for that parish, and click on whichever registers they like to browse through the images,” said NLI’s head of special collections, Colette O’Flaherty.

While the resources are not available to transcribe or index the records, she said such indices and transcripts are held by a network of family history centres around the country.

The online images of the mircrofilmed registers should complement their work by enabling researchers cross-reference the information they uncover.

The records being made available date from the 1740s to the 1880s, and most parishes have records of the dates of baptisms, marriages, including the names of godparents and witnesses to such events.

“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,” Ms O’Flaherty said.

“The role of the Catholic Church in creating and maintaining these records during some of the most turbulent times in Irish history must be acknowledged and praised,” she said.