Top 3 free websites for researching your Irish family history

More than 70 million people alive today, in all corners of the planet, can claim Irish ancestry – are you among this vibrant diaspora?

In the March 2018 issue of Family Tree, Editor Helen Tovey has rounded up 10 useful genealogy resources to help you research your roots back to Ireland and discover a heritage to be proud of.

Here are our top three picks from her selection of fantastic family history sites.

1  The National Archives of Ireland 1901 & 1911 Census site

The census is a gem of a genealogy source, listing people as it does by household (ie showing all the people under one roof, with occupations, birth places, ages and more). For Ireland, the census records that have survived the passage of time are the 1901 and 1911 Censuses – and they are available for free on The National Archives of Ireland census site.

2  IrishGenealogy.ie

Civil registration records for Ireland began from 1845 for Non-Roman Catholic marriages and from 1864 for all denominations’ birth, marriage and death registrations. Freely searchable at IrishGenealogy.ie the website gives not only the index details, but scanned copies of the full register pages (ie all the details that you’d get when ordering a certificate, but as a free download instead). Births records are available on the website up to 1916, marriages to 1941 and deaths to 1966.

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3 Parish registers

Digital scans of Roman Catholic parish registers are freely available here.

Find the parish you need, and work through the register page by page. Alternatively, search the transcriptions and images at Ancestry or Findmypast. Be warned, but not deterred: even records in the 1800s can be in Latin!

For Church of Ireland (CoI) parish registers see the work-in-progress here.

Find the full feature in the March 2018 issue of Family Tree.