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July 8, 2015

If You Have Irish Catholic Ancestors Today's Your Lucky Day

If You Have Irish Catholic Ancestors Today's Your Lucky Day
If you, like me, have Irish Catholic ancestors, today is your lucky day. The National Library of Ireland is due to launch their entire collection of Catholic Parish Registers at 2 p.m. It's free for researchers and should help many of us break down a brick wall or two!

 The collection covers 1,086 parishes throughout the island of Ireland and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records from the 1740s to the 1880s.

 I'm eagerly waiting for this set of records but expect their servers to crash for the first few days as genealogists rush to the site. In fact I went there just now and got this message when I chose various topics:

"Due to technical difficulties the main National Library website is currently unavailable."

Fingers crossed it will be up and running this afternoon. If anyone has success today, please let me know!
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8 comments:

  1. linda lemons10:04 AM

    i am so excited about this lorine - i have yet to figure out where my irish catholic ancestors came from and this will be a tremendous help for me!

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  2. Shirley10:23 AM

    I looked at a couple of the registers last night, and I don't know how much help they are for people that have no idea where their ancestors lived in Ireland. The registers are just locations and date ranges, no individual names. I was hoping for something a little more helpful.

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  3. Anonymous1:59 PM

    The site is working now.

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  4. Olive Tree Genealogy10:04 AM

    Shirley, in a perfect world we'd have these registers transcribed/indexed and be able to search by name. But I spent all day yesterday scrolling through the most likely locations for my Irish ancestors, and I can tell you the registers are challenging to read! It would take huge resources of time and money to get them transcribed/indexed.

    I'm just grateful they are online and I plan to go methodically through every page of every parish in Co. Down. I have no idea where my Irish guys lived (except it was Co. Down) I don't care if it takes me a year, I'll eventually get through them all. Not all genealogy research is easy or fast :-)

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  5. Awojos9:02 PM

    I'm sorry I am not sure how to get around on the site. I do not know what Parish they were from. Also is there a search tool so I can put their name in and it would search out the site? Thank you

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  6. Olive Tree Genealogy7:48 AM

    Awojos and Shirley

    See my recent blog post 10 Steps to Searching the Irish Catholic Parish Records When You Only Know a County of Origin for help

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  7. Anonymous12:03 PM

    found William jackson baptismal monsea &Kilodienau film 02381/01 1838 sept ann

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