Irish Catholic Clergy Database

A new digital archive and database of the Irish clerical population from medieval to modern times has been launched out of Maynooth University's Arts and Humanities Institute. It's called Clericus.ie.

The first phase of the Clericus project focussed on students and faculty of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, historically Ireland's largest seminary and pontifical university.

Now in its second phase, the Clericus research team is expanding the range of the project to include datasets from the early modern period and Irish clergy abroad. Among the newest additions to the database are more than 1,500 Irish clerics who attended the universities of Paris and Toulouse between 1573 and 1792. Similar research will gather data from Lisbon (1587-1850) and Salamanca (1592-1638).

It is anticipated that the database will further expand in the future with more information from a variety of sources.

Irish Catholic Parish Registers Online

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.