Death and Funeral Notices

As I continue my current fixation on researching old newspapers, I have come to realise I have quite a number of death, funeral and probate notices amongst my finds.

While many of these notices contain the basic details only, others provide a number of interesting details which can be very useful in further research.  Take the notices regarding my ancestor William Pummeroy and the details they provide.

Above is his death notice, from the Leader, Saturday 12 October 1889, page 43.  This notice not only gives William's date of death but his full address, age at death, names of his children (including married names of his daughters), a count of his grandchildren and how long he had lived in the colony - which helps me find his immigration details.  So much information is such a short statement.

Next we have the notice of the application for probate from The Age, Wednesday 16 October 1889, page 8.  This gives me William's occupation and the names, occupation and addresses of his executors - two of his sons.

Finally, I have a report of the details of William's will, something I have rarely found reported in the newspapers.  This was published in Table Talk (part of the Government Gazette), Friday 29 November 1889, page 6 and gives some wonderful detail of his property, belongings and the value of the estate he left behind.

Irish Registry of Deeds Index Project

The volunteers of the Irish Registry of Deeds Index Project have been hard at work on the project over the past few months, greatly expanding the work already done.

The purpose of this project is to provide finding aids for the records held at the Registry of Deeds in Dublin. There are three sets of indexes produced by the project:

• The main index is building a name index for the memorial transcription books held at the Registry of Deeds
• The grantors index consists of transcriptions of the Registry of Deeds' grantors indexes
• The townland index consists of transcriptions of the Registry of Deeds' townland indexes

Each of these index databases can be searched on a number of fields. None, of course, is complete. Each has those index entries contributed by the project volunteers.

Over the past year the Index has continued to grow, with the table above showing the current number of index entries.  All the Indexes are free to search