8 Days of Irish Research: Civil Registration
This is the fourth post in the series 8 Days of Irish Research.
One of the newest sets of records released for Irish research were the Civil Registration records, this is equal to what we would call vital records. It is the registration of birth, marriage and death’s in Ireland. These records cover:
- Deaths (with a 50 year privacy restriction).
- Marriages (with a 75 year privacy restriction).
- Births (with a 100 year privacy restriction).
The civil registration records can be found on IrishGenealogy.
Protestant marriages started registration in 1845, the balance of the marriages started in 1864. Birth and death registration also started in 1864. These records are indexed by quarter of the year, Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, July-Sep, and Oct-Dec. It is possible that the registration can be off, especially for births. Some researchers have found baptismal registrations for an ancestor that show one possible birth date and when they find the civil registration it is for a few months to up to a year later. Keep in mind that it cost to register the birth and sometimes the money was not available to pay the fee. Families would wait until they had the fee to register their child’s birth.
The great thing about these records is that they pick up where the Roman Catholic registers leave off. So, you should be able to bring the family research forward, if your family was still in Ireland. Please keep in mind that all the images have not been released at this point, though they are indexed. I believe that they are re-imaging some of these before they go live on the internet.
Some tips you might need to know about the marriage registrations:
- Full age in marriage records means they are 21 or over.
- Spinster just means they have not been married, yet.
- Marriage registration can sometimes name both parents, sometimes just the father.
- Marriage registration can also have the townland that the bride and groom lived in at time of marriage.
- Some marriage registrations do not show the wife’s name.
Using all the records that we are discussing can truly help you pull together your Irish Family Tree.
