Researching your Irish ancestors online can be difficult as there is no one-stop Web site with vast quantities of Irish family history records. Yet many sites offer valuable data for researching Irish ancestry in the form of extractions, transcriptions and digitized images. The sites presented here offer a mix of free and subscription-based (pay) content, but all represent major sources for online Irish family tree research.
Many Irish parish records of births (baptisms) and marriages have been transcribed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and can be searched for free on their Web site at FamilySearch.org. Coverage is by no means complete, but it is a good place to start. To help narrow down your search, you may find it helpful to use
Ireland IGI Batch Numbers - see
Using IGI Batch Numbers for a tutorial.
FreeThe Irish Family History Foundation (IFHF) is a coordinating body for a network of government approved genealogical research centres in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Together these research centres have computerized almost 40 million Irish ancestral records, primarily church records of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and made the indexes available online for free. To view a detailed record you can purchase credit online for instant access at a per-record cost.
Free index searches, pay to view detailed recordsThis subscription-based genealogy site features an Irish Wills Index (1484-1858), the 1851 Dublin City Census, Irish Royal Garrison Artillery Records, and the best online version of Griffiths Valuation. While other Web sites such as
MyIrishAncestry.com offer a free index to Griffiths, Irish Origins offers full details and links to digitized images. Free name search.
SubscriptionThe genealogy section of the National Archives of Ireland offers several free searchable databases, such as the Ireland-Australia Transportation Database, along with finding aids to many useful record series held in the National Archives. Of special interest is their digitization of Irish 1901 and 1911 census records. The first phase, consisting of Dublin City and County in 1911, is available for free searching and viewing online, with the rest to come.
FreeThis extensive Ulster genealogy database contains baptism, marriage, death, burial, and census records for over 1 million Irish ancestors in Counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. Most database results are indexes or partial transcriptions.
SubscriptionA variety of newspapers from Ireland's past have been digitized, indexed and made available for searching online through this subscription-based site. Searching is free, with a cost for viewing/downloading the pages. The site currently features over 1.5 million pages of newspaper content, with another 2 million in the works from papers such as
The Freeman's Journal (1763 to 1924),
Irish Independent (1905 to 2003) and
The Anglo-Celt (1908 to 2001).
SubscriptionThe personal Web site of John Hayes might not be the first place you'd expect to visit, but his site actually offers a surprising number of online Irish databases and transcribed documents, including Land Owners in Ireland 1876, Irish Flax Growers List 1796, Pigot & Co's Provincial Directory of Ireland 1824, cemetery transcriptions and photographs, and much more. Best of all, it is all free!
A variety of interesting Irish databases are offered online through this family history research site, although most require a subscription to access. The focus is rare 19th Century genealogical materials, most of which are exclusive to this site. The most popular database features transcriptions of gravestones from old churches and graveyards made by The Association for the Preservation of Memorials of the Dead, formed in 1888. Many of these headstones no longer exist today.
SubscriptionIn addition to excellent tutorials and guides for researching ancestry in Ireland Fianna also offers transcriptions from a variety of primary documents and records.
FreeThe U.S. National Archives has two online databases of information on immigrants who came to America from Ireland during the Irish famine, covering the years 1846 to 1851. The "Famine Irish Passenger Record Data File" has 605,596 records of passengers arriving in New York, about 70% of whom came from Ireland. The second database, "List of Ships that Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine," gives background detail on the ships that brought them over, including the total number of passengers.
FreeThis beautiful site presents an inventory of war memorials in Ireland, along with inscriptions, photographs and other details of each memorial. You can browse by location or war, or search by surname.
FreeIf you know the name of a town that your ancestors came from but cannot find it on a map, this resource will help locate it! Search for a particular Irish place name, or enter a townland or county to generate a list all of the civil parishes, poor law unions, and townlands in a particular area.
