Irish Registrations Come Online!

     

     I've spent the past few days grabbing every spare moment to pour over the newly released birth, marriage and death registers at Irish Genealogy.ie, and resenting the need to tear myself away for things like sleeping, eating and working. (Have you ever noticed how people will look at you strangely when you lament you'd rather be searching for dead people than writing production lists?)

     These are images of the actual full records, the kind you formerly had to send away to the GRO to obtain!  The death records cover the years 1891 to 1965, marriages from 1882-1940 and births from 1864-1915.  That's sort of late for those of us whose ancestors were famine immigrants, but still a way to help trace family members who stayed behind in Ireland and conceivably aid in finding some living relatives there.  I've been able to view records for many individuals I located in the indexes that have been available online for some time, and confirm they were in fact the ancestors I believed them to be--and in one case proven wrong.

     Unfortunately the death records don't give parent's names so it's not always easy to be sure exactly whose death you're looking at unless the informant's name is a familiar one, particularly if the deceased is a woman now bearing her husband's surname.  The marriage records do give the father's full name along with his occupation and the birth records give both parent's names.  All also give a townland.

     So far I've confirmed several theories and found the occupation of James Quigley of Baltinglass, husband of my 3rd great-aunt Anne McGarr.  One record states he was a "dealer" and another that he was a shopkeeper.  I'm not sure what sort of shopkeeper signs his name with an X, but there you are.  I also discovered a sad story about a distant cousin being orphaned at age 15 when both his parents died within a few years of each other of TB.  Somehow their son escaped that dreadful killer to be the informant on his grandmother's death record ten years later, but in four more years he too would succumb.  

     The records aren't yet complete but more are being added over time. You may will be annoyed by the repeated requests to prove you aren't a robot, but it's well worth that small aggravation, and be sure not to add the apostrophe if you're searching for a name like O'Connor, the search engine doesn't recognize it and will return a negative result.  I hope you find some interesting family facts in these new records, and there are rumors that by month's end the long awaited cancelled books will arrive online.  Keeping my fingers crossed...