So you want to get started with building your Irish family tree? Here are some initial tips from someone who has recently used (mostly) online tools to link back five or six generations…
Software
Firstly, I’d recommend getting a desktop application for storing your findings! There are various mobile apps that link into the big services like Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast and FamilySearch, but this kind of thing is difficult to manage successfully on a phone or tablet. Personally, I use MacFamilyTree (paid). Also, Gramps is a great, free Open Source multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) programme for managing your family tree. It can be used to create the tree itself, generate websites, reports, charts, and more to share with others in your family. It also exports/imports to/from the GEDCOM format for exchanging genealogical data. You can install add-ons to have more fancy chart views and other features. Download it from https://gramps-project.org
Civil records
A starting point
To get started, try looking for your grandparents’ or great-grandparent’s marriage records at the excellent, free and CAPTCHA-protected Irish civil records resource https://irishgenealogy.ie and have fun working your way back through their parents’ BMD (birth, marriage, death) records. You can find out what your great-great-grandparents died from: eek! Once you are ‘in’ the early 20th century, you can cross reference with census data (more on this later). You can also follow this guide to change the colour of visited links, e.g. to bright red or green, so that you can remember what records you’ve already seen.
Searching
Be imaginative in terms of the name variants you use in keyword searches as recording was sometimes incorrectly done (I found a Bryan registered as a Bernard in a marriage record). You could try searching for surnames only, or variants of surnames (trying variations like O’Donnell, ODonnell, O Donnell and Donnell may yield the required record eventually). Wildcards are also an option, and you can read this excellent article by John Grenham for more (his book “Tracing Your Irish Ancestors” is also highly recommended). You will likely need to know the SR District/Reg Area to help filter results (SR stands for Superintendent Registrar): examples are Fermoy, Roscrea, Tuam, etc. You can also use the advanced search to specify extra options like mother’s surname, etc. where available.
Coverage
The date ranges for the indexes (i.e. the basic metadata) on this site are: births from 1864 to 1923; marriages from 1845 (COI) or 1864 (RC) to 1948; and deaths from 1864 to 1973. Note that somewhere between 15% and 30% of civil registrations may never have been recorded in the first place depending on the region, so don’t be surprised if there is a gap or three in the records. You may be able to fill some of these gaps through church records. Full registry images (with more detail than the indexes) are available for the following years: births from 1864 to 1923 (same as the indexes); marriages from 1864 to 1948; and deaths from 1878 to 1973.
Some details of what you can expect to find
For births, you can see the parents’ names (including the mother’s maiden name), occupation of the father, and a witness/informant who is often a relative. For marriages, you can see both individuals’ ages (unless maddeningly listed as “[of] full age”) and occupations, fathers’ names and occupations, and sometimes information on whether the fathers are alive or deceased (if not included they could be living or not). Deaths include the cause of death and whether the cause was verified (medically certified) or not, along with a witness who again may be related.
What’s not online?
Another year of records (extending to 1923, 1948 and 1973 for BMD respectively) were released in 2024. Images for marriages going further back to 1845 (COI) and deaths back to 1864 are currently being worked on by the team. It should be noted that when looking through indexes online, the records that show a lot of metadata in the search results are often ones that have no associated scanned image, and the ones with less metadata shown initially will potentially have an image. However, even if no image is online (yet!), you can request a photocopy of the register entry/image from the GRO (General Register Office) in person at their office (see below), or by using this form via post (or fax!). Some 1916 rising leader records (Pearse, Ceannt, etc.) are unavailable, perhaps as they were later amended.
The GRO
If you go to the GRO office on Werburgh Street in Dublin, you will see a big Research Room with desks and walls of index books for BMD records, with pay as you go (€2, limited to five years of indexes in one BMD category) or pay per day (€20, for all you can eat data!) rates to access these indexes. You then pay the standard €4 rate to get a photocopy of individual register entries you have identified. Having the year, quarter (if applicable), volume and page number in the register will be of help in speeding up retrieval. Sometimes the year and Group Registration ID will be given in the (online) index instead, and this can be provided. The main tip here is that if you can come prepared and bring this precise reference information with you from the online index, you may not have to consult and pay for access to the physical indexes/books at all.
Census
Coverage
As you may know, the 19th century censuses either perished in an infamous 1922 fire or were mistakenly shredded on government orders (since copies were assumed to have been made, but weren’t). However, complete censuses for 1901 and 1911 are available. You should find all or nearly all ancestors living at those times. Of the 49 instances of ancestors I should have expected to find in the censuses, I found 47. You can browse by townland or search by name. Again, be imaginative in terms of spellings, for names and townlands. You may also be lucky if a relative applied for a pension in the early 20th century and filed a census search. Scans of some of these 1851 census search application forms are available, annotated with the results found (if any). I found about six or seven ancestors listed on these searches. The later 1926 census will also be made available in April 2026: I am really looking forward to this because one of my ancestors came from Mayo, but I have no idea where exactly she was from. In the 1926 census, one of the data fields was their birthplace, including the name of the parish.
Some details of what’s in there
1911 records include additional information not found in the 1901 census, such as years married and number of children born/living. The years married entry can help with finding civil or church marriage records (usually from the parish of the bride), but again be flexible as the number of years specified may not be exact. Some sites like Donegal Genealogy have taken these census records and annotated families/townlands with additional useful information.
Church records
Roman Catholic
The National Library of Ireland has digitised older (20th century) microfilm scans of various baptism and marriage records from Catholic parishes. Coverage really depends on what had survived in the various parishes (from when records started/were kept) and how much of that was actually captured on microfilm. These scans can be browsed at http://registers.nli.ie/, but text searches can be performed on transcribed data at FindMyPast.ie, once you register for free and log in to the site. Some county-specific websites like the Clare Library Genealogy page have easily accessible transcriptions or Excel files of many of these church registers, donated by superstar volunteers. There are some areas of concern in relation to uncaptured records nationally, as described here. Also try rootsireland.ie (subscription).
Other resources
Big sites
There are lots of paid sites like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FindMyPast.com and the free FamilySearch.org (LDS) where people build their own trees. They can be good, with photos and details you may never have seen elsewhere, but also can suffer from a fair bit of noise and erroneous assumptions so it is very much a case of buyer beware. They are worth browsing at least to get a start on your trees, or try out their free trials.
Old newspapers
Irish Newspaper Archives (https://irishnewsarchive.com) is a subscription site with a large range of old Irish newspaper articles. Some universities and colleges have a site license if you have access to same. The British Newspaper Archive is also subscription only (https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/), but you can still glean quite a bit of useful information from searches on family members or townlands without clicking into the full articles. At least, you can gather the basics for later (paid) research. For some reason, using O Donnell or O’Donnell can display the text or not from matching articles (probably an erroneous escaping of the search string).
Military archives
Did your ancestor serve in the IRA or Cumann na mBan or related military organisation from 1916 to 1923? Check the Military Archives for any pensions or medals awarded at http://www.militaryarchives.ie/en/genealogy or go to their Reading Room to consult full applications for any relatives found. I found over 100 pages including scanned letters and envelopes linked to one of my ancestor’s pensions through their amazing online service.
Emigrants
Did you have a relative who emigrated or travelled to the US? Try the Ellis Island passenger search or earlier records from Castle Garden, and see if they recorded hair and eye colours. You may also find information on your ancestors from their children who emigrated to the US or Australia or elsewhere, through passenger manifests, marriages or death records in those countries (I confirmed an ancestor’s maiden name through both an Australian marriage and death record).
Other registers and court records
FindMyPast (paid) has an eclectic collection of images from dog licence books, petty session (court) order books, electoral registers, landed estate court rentals and valuation office records from the 19th century. You may even find applications from evicted tenants from the late 19th or early 20th century. Some libraries (Galway City and County, for example) and colleges/universities have on-site access to FindMyPast. You may be able to find out what type of dog(s) your great-great-grandfather owned without actually knowing when they themselves (your ancestor!) were born or when they died.
Land valuations
The Tithe Applotments can be useful to confirm a (usually male) ancestor in the 1820s and 1830s. See also if they pop up again in Griffith’s Valuation 25 years later. The Ask About Ireland subsite at http://askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/ allows you to also overlay a map from that time on top of a modern Google Map, so if you know that your ancestors have always lived in a particular house or area, you can trace back to who lived in that house or area in the 1850s (potentially a relative).
Ireland Reaching Out
“John! You should also be using the Ireland Reaching Out website http://www.irelandxo.com — huge amount of #free #irishgenealogy advice there from volunteers worldwide — especially if you are tracing abroad! #irelandxo” — https://twitter.com/MikeFeerick/status/1131593892627918849
Tips and tricks
Saving record files
I use a unique key with a combination of the letters F (female) and M (male) to store downloaded PDFs or JPGs of various records. For example, “MFM Casey, John Birth Record.pdf” is my (I’m the first M) mother’s father’s birth record. I realise that the M and F can also be confused with mother and father, but once you learn, you learn. So far, this makes it easy for me to find stuff. This is known as the atree or Binary Ahnentafel method.
Old photos
If you have any old black and white photos of your ancestors, you might try the wonderful DeOldify deep learning framework to colourise them quickly and effectively. For geeks, you can use the Google Colab interface here (see this tutorial) and for non-geeks, try the paid services from MyHeritage In Color (DeOldify), colorizeimages.com and Palette.fm.
One more thing…
…as Steve Jobs used to say! I’ve created a reusable spreadsheet to capture the essentials of your family tree. This includes you and five generations prior (1+2+4+8+16+32=63 people). I’ve colour coded rows corresponding to the ancestors of your grandparents. It is available here http://bit.ly/ancestrytree (shrunk and copied below) and can provide a bird’s eye view of what you do and do not have in terms of your core ancestry records. The gaps become clearly visible when it is filled in. You could add more rows if more ancestors are ‘available’, or more columns for Tithe Applotments, Griffith’s Valuation, etc.
Cloud 
Leave a comment