A few days ago I wrote about free access to Irish Catholic parish records on Find My Past. These records are also availble on Ancestry,

In my experience to date I prefer the Ancestry Irish Catholic parish records. I have found a few new members of my extended family via the Ancestry Irish Catholic parish records. The records seem more complete, although that may or may not be true in general, it seems to be the case for my family.

I also like that the Ancestry index seems to be more often linked to an image of the actual record. That may be of limited value since the records are written in Latin and often hard to read. But it is nice to se the oriinal record and verify that it was indexed correctly. (I have not found a mistake yet.)

Good news for those with an interest in Irish genealogy. For some time now, we have known Irish Catholic parish records would be put an the internet with a searchable index.

Find My Past has put a searchable index of Irish Catholic parish records online, and it is free for a limited time. This has long been desirable since the are the state of useful records for Irish genealogy is so poor. In fact, births of Catholics were not included in public records until 1864.

Many of those records that did exist were destroyed during the Irish civil war. So the state of genealogical records in Ireland is pretty bad for everyone and worse for those of us with Catholic ancestors. That is why a searchable index for Irish Catholic parish records is so important. Continue reading “Irish Catholic parish records”