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Latest Irish Genealogy News
Rolling news for Irish family historians
Last updated 12 April 2025
Irish Genealogy News: April 2025
RootsIreland has added 2,410 records from County Monaghan to its database. The upload includes a mix of 606 marriage records from Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Wesleyan Methodits and Roman Catholic congregations; some 560 Catholic Baptisms; and 1,250 school records dating from 1867 to 1919. For details, see the site's Monaghan menu of online sources.
Half price subscriptions are on offer (first time for years) from FindMyPast until Tuesday 22 April 2025. See Special Offers page.
Free access to 1939 Register! To mark the upcoming 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE Day), FindMyPast is offering free access to the 1939 Register collection until 8 May.
The collection includes records of each person living in England and Wales (plus some living in the Isle of Man and Channel Islands) and was introduced to provide a snapshot of demographics and skills just prior to war being declared in September 1939. The records typically include each individual's name, full date of birth, marital status, occupation and address. Those born after 1925 are redacted, unless they are known to have died.
Ancestry has uploaded an index to the UK, WWI Hospital Registers, 1915-1919, a collection of 818,003 British military hospital records from WW1. In addition to basic personal identification data, the Index includes dates for admissions and discharges from facilities such as field ambulances, casualty clearing stations, hospital trains and ships. The records may link to original documents on Fold 3 and Forces War that include details such as medical diagnoses, period and place of treatment centres.
Tipperary Studies, the online home of County Tipperary's Library Service, has announced that its free-to-access digital archive has achieved an impressive milestone of 3 million hits. The site offers access to an extensive collection of historical and cultural materials including rare manuscripts, vintage photographs, maps, parish records, and much more. Check it out at tippstudiesdigital.ie.
More Irish historical newspapers have joined the BritishNewspaperArchive*. New to the online database are the Irish Homestead, the Jewish Echo, Warder & Dublin Weekly Mail, Morning Mail (Dublin), and the Irish Textile Journal.
Additional editions have also been available for some of last month's new titles including the Clare Champion, Irish Field, New Ross Reporter, Wicklow Press, Drogheda Advertiser, Cork Weekly Herald, Nenagh Guardian, and Limerick Leader.
*These updates also apply to FindMyPast's Irish Newspaper Collection.
IrishGenealogy.ie, the free state-managed database providing access to civil Births, Marriages and Deaths (and some church records) has received its "rolling year" update. It now holds:
Births: Republic of Ireland 1864 to 1924 indexes and images; Northern Ireland 1864 to 1922 indexes and images.
Marriages: Republic of Ireland 1845* to 1949 indexes and images; Northern Ireland 1845* to 1922 indexes and images.
Deaths: All Ireland 1864 to 1870 indexes only; Republic of Ireland 1871 to 1974 indexes and images; Northern Ireland 1871 to 1922 indexes and images.
Skibbereen Heritage Centre has expanded its Cork Graveyards Project, and its resulting free-to-access online database now holds more than 100,000 burial/funeral register records from 143 graveyards across the county. Where available, images of the register pages are provided. This latest update sees geographical coverage extend to the north of County Cork.
Irish Genealogy News: March 2025
Newspapers.com, one of Ancestry's sister databases, has added 2.5 million+ pages of Irish newspapers to its offering. This upload features eight titles that circulated across the island, plus the Evening Herald which covered national news but was predominently a Dublin paper. More titles will join the database soon.
And another St Patrick's Day gift comes from BritishNewspaperArchive, and it's a big one for Irish family historians: Eleven titles have been added to the database, and some 32 others have seen welcome expansions to their existing individual holdings (mostly from the first or second decade of the C20th). You'll find all the details in the BNA's blogpost here. The same changes will be made to FindMyPast's Irish Newspaper Collection.
Ancestry has added Ireland, Quarter Session Licences to Keep Arms, 1832-1836, a collection of transcribed records noting licences granted to 4,700 named individuals (none Catholic), their residences, and the number and type of their weapons eg muskets, blunderbusses, bayonets, pistols and swords.
Ancestry DNA test kits are on sale to researchers in the UK and Ireland until 11:59pm on Sunday 30 March. Find out more on the Special Offers page.
FindMyPast's St Patrick's Day releases are as follow:
Ireland Huguenot Histories: This new collection, exclusive to FindMyPast, tells the story of Ireland's Huguenots - a group of French Protestants who settled in Ireland (among other places) between the 16th and 19th centuries. It is searchable by name and holds 2,578 records.
The Irish cemetery records collection has also been expanded, with 3,600 additions ready for searching.
Also joining the database are the four new newspaper titles that were recently added to the BNA holding. See the last news item. (FindMyPast and the BritishNewspaperArchive are sister companies; they share access to the collection.)
The BritishNewspaperArchive (BNA) has added four new Irish titles to its database. They are: New Ross Reporter, 1897-1901, 1903 and 1907-1910; Clare Champion, 1910-1916; Offaly Independent, 1910-1911; and Zozimos: 1870-1872.
Additionally, the BNA's holding of The Londonderry Standard has been expanded, with editions from 1901, 1903, 1907-1908, 1925 now available.
The BNA now holds more than 90.3million pages of published newspapers, journals and magazines.
RootsIreland.ie is offering a 25% discount on new 12-month subscriptions to its database. Offer ends 31 March. See Special Offers page.
Free DNA unlock: If you have already taken a DNA test with another provider, you can upload the DNA data to MyHeritage for free this week (expires 9 March 2025). Not only will you not be charged the usual $29 unlock fee per file, you will receive all the company's advanced DNA features free forever.
Women's History Month is being celebrated this March at Ancestry UK with free access to the 1911 and 1921 Censuses of England, Wales, and the Channel Islands; the WW2 Women's Land Army Index cards, the 1939 Register of England and Wales, and the outgoing UK & Ireland Ships’ Passenger Lists 1890-1960. The Free Access ends at 11:59pm on Sunday 9 March 2025. You need to register for a free account if you don't already have one. Find out more here.
Irish Genealogy News: February 2025
The Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) has added to its exclusive Early Irish Birth, Death & Marriage Indexes collection. Some 2,500 new records have been uploaded, bringing the total number of individuals recorded across the three databases to about 275,000. The collection is the work of volunteers gathering evidence of BMDs drawn from alternative and lesser known historical sources. Access to the marriage index is completely free to all, while the birth and death indexes allow free name searches for non-members.
IrishGenealogy.ie, the state managed database holding indexes of Ireland's civil Birth, Marriage and Death records indexes and, for most years, BMD registration images, has been redesigned. Some of the new features work well. Some do not. These will, hopefully, be ironed out in due course. For a thorough overview of the new site, see this review by Dublin-based professional genealogist Claire Bradley.
We are now awaiting the annual update of another 'rolling year' of registration entries.
New at Ancestry is the Ireland, Police Report Abstracts, 1845-1885 Index. It provides indexed information (no images) from police reports of principal Outrages filed in counties Tipperary, Limerick, Clare, Leitrim and Roscommon. It holds 28,880 records. It includes details of people involved or injured in the crimes, some of which occurred in counties outside the five counties noted above.
Another addition to the Ancestry database is the Ballymena, Antrim, Northern Ireland, Internments, 1875-1934. This record set is an Index of 9,600 transcribed high-quality primary historical sources of burial records. The originals are held at the local Briad Museum. (See also last month's upload of headstone inscriptions.)
RootsIreland.ie has added 5,282 Roman Catholic baptismal records from the parish of Kilcummin, Co. Kerry, dating from 1821-1900. The parish is a few miles north of Killarney. See an up to date list of sources at kerry.rootsireland.ie.
RootsIreland.ie has added to its Co. Cork database with 1,350 RC baptismal records dating from the year 1924 and 196 RC marriage records for the year 1949. All the topped up parishes (see list) are in the North or East of the county.
Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives: The following records (headstone photos + inscriptions) were added to the free database during January:
- County Carlow - St. Brigids Part 2, Clonegal (Updated)
- County Kerry - Ahavoher Burial Ground, Parts 4 & 5 (Completed)
- County Kilkenny - Regina Caeli Cemetery, Mooncoin - Pt 4 (Completed)
- County Limerick - Reilig Ide Naofa, Abbeyfeale (Updated)
- County Wexford - St. John's Graveyard, Kilturk, Ballyhealy.
My Irish Genealogy News blog was published from April 2011 to July 2024. It proved extremely popular and for many genealogists - ever eager to keep abreast of the latest record releases, events, discounts, book launches and other developments - "Claire Santry's blog" was the day's first online stop.
The decision to close it was difficult but, in the end, pretty much forced upon me due to family and other commitments. Its content will remain online, with no further updates, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, I still have writing commitments to fulfil this year so I need to keep up-to-date with what's going on in Irish genealogy. I'll be keeping notes, and I may as well share them. They'll be brief - very brief - and, unlike my blogposts, these news snippets won't provide details or opinion/comment and they definitely won't be daily!
Please feel free to bookmark this temporary and very-much honed-down version of Irish Genealogy News.
30 August 2024
