Top 5 websites for tracing Church of Ireland ancestors

If your ancestors were Irish, you may believe that they adhered to one religion or another, but the truth is often quite different. Many Irish people have a mix of denominations within their ancestry, requiring research into various resources.

In the June 2018 issue of Family Tree, professional genealogist Chris Paton reveals the range of records available and how to use them for tracing your family history, and here we've selected five websites – all but one accessible for free – for specifically locating Church of Ireland records.

But first, a bit of history. The Anglican-based Church of Ireland was the main State church on the island from the 16th century until its eventual disestablishment in January 1871, following the passing of the Irish Church Act of 1869. Anglican parishes were coterminous with the civil parishes, and the Church effectively acted as a wing of Government in the civilian administration of the land.

• Another article that might interest you: Top 3 free genealogy websites for tracing Irish pauper ancestors removed from Britain to Ireland.

If your ancestors were Anglican, the records can be extremely helpful, with some surviving back to the 17th century. Unfortunately, the key word here is ‘surviving’. The historic registers were viewed as State records, and were gathered into the Public Record Office in Dublin following the Church’s disestablishment in 1871. The opening act of the Irish Civil War in 1922 saw virtually all of those within the archive’s custody destroyed in flames at the Four Courts fire in Dublin.

Thankfully from April 1845 the civil registration of non-Catholic marriages commenced in Ireland. Anglican churches were required from this point to keep two copies of registrars, one of which was to be transmitted to the Registrar General on a quarterly basis; these records have thus also survived.

Here's where to find them:

1) Surviving vital records registers and vestry records can be accessed on microfilm at the National Archives of Ireland 

2) or at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

3) The Anglican Church’s own archive, the Dublin-based Representative Church Body Library, holds further material, with some available as part of Mark Williams’s Anglican Record Project.

4) The largest collection of online transcribed archives are those at the fee-based site RootsIreland

5) Find additional free-to-access holdings for Dublin City, and Counties Carlow and Kerry, available at IrishGenealogy.ie

To read Chris Paton's full article about finding Irish church records – including Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Huguenot and Jewish – don’t miss the June 2018 issue of Family Tree.

Image of the Four Courts fire in Dublin, which destroyed the Public Record Office in 1922, courtesy of National Library of Ireland Flickr.