Nearly 400,000 Irish Catholic parish records have been made publicly accessible via the National Library of Ireland. People researching their Irish family tree from all corners of the globe will be able to search the records - which date from the 1740s to the 1880s – for free.
Typically the parish registers include information such as the dates of baptisms and marriages and the names of the key people involved, including godparents or witnesses. From July researchers are able to search for the relevant record by parish location, where they will find black and white images of all the microfilms held in the original registers.
It should be noted that there will not be transcripts or indexes for the images, so you will need to know which parish your Irish Catholic ancestors lived in prior to searching. There are, however, links on the website to help you identify parish boundaries. Also noteworthy is that there are some 56 parishes for which the NLI holds no registers. The parish may have come into existence after 1880 which was the cut-off date for microfilming, or the register may not have been microfilmed by the NLI. Each parish page displays links to other websites which may hold indexes for registers which were not microfilmed. The vast majority of original registers are still held within individual parishes, so it may be worthwhile contacting the particular parish of interest.
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