In June nineteen twenty-two, a fire in Dublin destroyed seven centuries of records stored in the Public Record Office. People will tell you that is why you cannot trace an Irish family. It is not true. Many of the key records from the mid-eighteen hundreds onward survived, the Irish government has put them online, and they cost nothing. Here is the route, step by step, with one real family followed from start to finish.
Prefer to watch? The video above covers everything on this page.
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Step 1: start in America
Step one is not in Ireland at all. Before any website, ask the oldest person in your family what they remember, and write it down. To search Irish records you need three things: a name, a rough date, and a place. The place is the hard one, and it is usually written down in America. Look for naturalization papers. Before nineteen oh six, any court could make a citizen, so there is no single index: try the county courthouse. Look at passenger lists, which the National Archives holds from eighteen twenty onward and which can give a place of birth. And look at the census. From nineteen hundred to nineteen thirty it asked immigrants what year they arrived. FamilySearch has many of these free. You need an account, but not a credit card.
Step 2: the census
Step two: the census, at the National Archives of Ireland. Nineteen oh one and nineteen eleven are online in full, for the whole island, with a picture of the form your family filled in. And since April of this year, so is nineteen twenty-six, for the twenty-six counties of the Free State. There was no census in nineteen twenty-one: the War of Independence stopped it. You can search by name, or walk in by place: the county, then the district, then the townland, house by house. Our family: Bartholomew Sullivan, a farmer, fifty years old in nineteen eleven, in a townland called Gearha in County Kerry. The form says he and his wife Margaret have been married fourteen years and have had six children, five of them living. It lists the children, Molly, Maggie, Julianne, Lizzie and Stephen, and says the whole household was born in County Kerry. And at the bottom he signs it, in his own hand: Batt Sullivan. The mistake people make here is searching one spelling. Try Bartholomew, Bat and Batt.
Step 3: births, marriages and deaths
Step three: births, marriages and deaths, on the government's own site, Irish Genealogy dot I E. It has births from eighteen sixty-four to nineteen twenty-five, marriages to nineteen fifty, and deaths from eighteen seventy-one to nineteen seventy-five, with the page of the register itself. The years stop there for privacy: births must be a hundred years old, marriages seventy-five, deaths fifty. Deaths before eighteen seventy-one are not online yet; the register office says it is working on them. Married fourteen years in nineteen eleven means a wedding about eighteen ninety-seven. Search Sullivan, marriages, Killarney district, and there it is: Bat Sullivan and Maggie Horgan, the sixteenth of March eighteen ninety-seven. Open the register and you get what the census could not give you: his father, Timothy Sullivan, a farmer, and hers, Timothy Horgan, a tailor. One free record, and you are a generation further back. Then their first child: Mary, born on Christmas Eve eighteen ninety-seven. In the census, the family calls her Molly. The census gives her age as fourteen. Her birth record makes her thirteen. Ages drift, so search a few years either side. The mistake here is the place. The register says Killarney, but that is the registration district, the office, not where the family lived.
Step 4: before 1864, the parish
Step four takes you back before eighteen sixty-four, and here you need the parish. The National Library of Ireland has put its microfilms of Catholic parish registers online, from about seventeen forty to eighteen eighty. You look through them parish by parish, which is why the townland from the census matters so much. Those films stop about eighteen eighty, so for a later baptism use the civil birth record instead. For some places, Kerry, Dublin city, Carlow and part of Cork, the government site has those church records typed out and searchable. A star stands for letters you are not sure of: M, star, Carthy finds both McCarthy and MacCarthy. Names were copied exactly as the priest wrote them, mistakes and all, and often in Latin.
Step 5: the land
Step five is the land. Griffith’s Valuation, made between eighteen forty-seven and eighteen sixty-four, lists who occupied each piece of ground in the country. The Tithe Applotment Books do the same for farmland a generation earlier, in the eighteen twenties and thirties. Both are free. Both name only the person who held the land, not the family in the house. One thing to know about the north: the government site covers the whole island only until nineteen twenty-two. For the north, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland holds church records of every denomination, and for the border counties too.
What does not exist
Now the honest part: what does not exist. Ireland took a census every ten years from eighteen twenty-one. The first four were almost all burned in that fire in nineteen twenty-two. The next two were destroyed on purpose by the government of the day. And eighteen eighty-one and eighteen ninety-one were pulped in nineteen eighteen, probably for the paper. Nineteen oh one and nineteen eleven survived by luck: they had not yet been moved into that building. So nobody can sell you your family in the census of eighteen fifty-one. It is gone. What survives of the wreck is being gathered, free, in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. You will see paid sites advertised. For everything in this video, you do not need one.
The free sites
- IrishGenealogy.ie (Government of Ireland): civil births 1864 to 1925, marriages 1845 to 1950, deaths 1871 to 1975, and church records for some areas
- National Archives of Ireland: the 1901, 1911 and 1926 censuses, and the surviving fragments of 1821 to 1851
- National Library of Ireland: Catholic parish registers, about 1740 to 1880
- Griffith's Valuation, 1847 to 1864 (Ask About Ireland)
- Tithe Applotment Books, about 1823 to 1837 (National Archives of Ireland)
- Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
- Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland
- U.S. National Archives: naturalization records
- U.S. National Archives: passenger arrival records
- FamilySearch (free)
So: the place from America. The household from the census. The parents from the marriage register. Then the parish, and the land. Bat Sullivan signed his name in nineteen eleven. A hundred and fifteen years later, anyone can read it, for nothing.
Checked against each site on 14 October 2026.
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