How to trace Irish genealogy

To maximise your chance of success with your Irish family history, you should gather all the information you can on the relatives you know. Do you have a family member who may be able to tell you more about the older generations? 

Asking the important questions now – like when and where your grandmother was born, or whether your great-grandfather was in the military – may make all the difference further down the line. 

For yourself, your parents and your grandparents, you’ll need the following information: 

• Full name  
• Birth date (and death date where applicable) 
• Place of birth 

The more specific you can get with the location, the better – though even knowing the county or the province is useful. 

Tracing your Irish family history can be trickier than tracing English, Welsh and Scottish ancestry, for a number of reasons: 

• Most of Ireland’s 19th-century census records were destroyed in a fire at the Public Records Office in 1922. Only fragments survive, meaning we can’t trace Victorian Irish ancestors decade-by-decade like we can in the UK or the US. 
• Irish birth, marriage and death records start later than English ones. These records are important for building your family tree, as they establish the key milestones in your relatives’ lives. Births and marriages weren’t recorded by the Irish government until 1864, so you have to rely on church records pre-1864. 
• Irish placenames have also changed over time, which can make it trickier to locate your ancestors in the parish, townland or civil registration district that they lived. 

Being aware of these potential stumbling blocks will help you to overcome them and make fascinating discoveries despite gaps in the Irish records. 

Where birth, marriage or death records or censuses aren’t available, you may be able to find the information you need in old newspapers, prison records, workhouse registers and other religious documents – all digitised and easy to search online. 

By using all the family history records available to you, you can build a vivid picture of your Irish ancestors’ lives and delve deeper into the world they inhabited.