|
|
              |
Church
Records
THE CHURCH OF IRELAND From 1537 until 1870 the Church of Ireland
was the state church in Ireland. Although
it was initially committed to spreading Protestantism to the native Irish
population, its congregations were made up mostly of English and Scottish
settlers and officials. .
The vast majority of landowners were Anglican, and, outside Ulster, its
membership consisted mostly of the professional classes.
Fifty per cent or more of all barristers, solicitors, civil engineers,
medical men, architects and bankers are listed in the 1861 census as members of
the Church of Ireland. There was a legal obligation
for the Church of Ireland to keep records from 1634, although many rural
parishes did not start to keep detailed records until the middle of the
eighteenth century. Nevertheless,
as a general rule the records of the Church of Ireland start much earlier than
those of other Protestant denominations and of the Roman Catholic Church. REGISTERS Parish
registers of baptism, marriage and burial are the most important class of parish
record available to researchers. They should not be neglected because an ancestor was of
another denomination. Before 1782
it was not legal for Presbyterian ministers to perform marriages, and until 1844
they could not perform ‘mixed marriages’.
For this reason many marriages of other denominations, especially those
classed as Dissenters, are recorded in the Church of Ireland registers.
Almost
half of the surviving registers were destroyed in 1922 and others have been lost
at earlier periods. However, much of the lost information survives in
transcripts and abstracts. The registers of 637
parishes in local custody survived, and in addition transcript of or extracts
from destroyed registers are available.
The most recent published listing of parish registers is Noel Reid
(ed) A table of Church of Ireland parochial records and copies (Irish
Family History Society, Naas, 1994). The
NAI is in the process of completing the making of microfilm copies of surviving
Church of Ireland parish registers, but no all of these are yet accessible to
the public. The Public Record
Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast hold microfilm copies of nearly all
surviving registers for the Six Counties. A
growing number of surviving original registers is in the Representative Church
Body Library in Dublin while others remain in local parochial custody.
The standard, but by no means, complete, guide is the NAI guide to
Parochial Records of the Church of Ireland (typescript), a partly updated
version of which is Noel Reid Editor, A Table of Church of Ireland Parochial
Records and Copies, Naas 1994. See
also Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, An Irish Genealogical Source: Guide to Church Records, Belfast 1974.
For further information see Raymond Refausse, ‘Records of the Church of
Ireland’, in J G Ryan Editor, Irish Church Records, Dublin 1992. THE
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH Roman
Catholicism is the overwhelmingly predominate creed in Ireland.
The Penal Laws were a series of
enactments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries designed to
remove the rights of Catholics to public office and to careers in certain
professions. In spite of the Penal
Laws, Catholic priests and bishops operated freely in most areas.
Nevertheless, the Penal Laws, militated
against the erection of chapels and regular record keeping.
Roman Catholic registers therefore generally date from a later period
than the equivalent Church of Ireland records, the majority dating from the
1820s. Roman Catholic parishes are often made up
of parts of more than one civil parish. Also,
most Roman Catholic parishes have more than one church.
Sometimes only one register was kept for the entire parish, but at other
times each church had its own registers. Starting
dates for Roman Catholic Parish records vary from one part of the country to the
other. They start earliest in the
cities with those for some city parishes in Dublin, Galway, Waterford, Cork and
Limerick dating back to the late eighteenth century.
Many of the registers in counties in rural districts in the west of
Ireland do not begin until the middle of the nineteenth century. The
main information given in baptism records is date, names of both parents
(including the mother’s maiden name, a custom not followed by Church of
Ireland records), the names of two sponsors or godparents (often grandparents or
other relatives) and sometimes (not always alas) the place of abode (which is
very useful when trying to locate individual families with a name common to the
district). Illegitimate births are
faithfully recorded. The
main information given in marriage records is date of marriage, place (the
church in which the ceremony took place), names of both parties (including the
bride’s maiden name) and the names of two witnesses (often parents or other
family, or best friends). The abode
of the couple’s parents is not always given.
This latter situation improves in the 1860s with the introduction of new
registers, which have a column for address.
Some priests had been careful to record addresses before this, but in
general this is not the case. The
same goes for baptism records. Death
or burial records are not well kept in Catholic parishes.
The same register was generally used for births, marriages and deaths).
Church of Ireland records of deaths and burials are much more thorough
and extensive. The registers remain the property of the
Roman Catholic Church. Most of them
are on microfilm (to 1880) at the NLI. Few
of these are indexed. The National
Library has produced a list of the parish registers which can be consulted on
microfilm in the Library. Parishes
are listed alphabetically by diocese and the dates of the registers in each
parish and the National Library Call Number are given.
Please note that call numbers are not given for the diocese of Cashel and
Emly or for the Diocese of Kerry. This
is because permission from the diocese is needed to view the films of these
registers. PRONI
has microfilm copies for parishes in Ulster.
They are to be found under MIC/1D. In
addition there are some copies under CR/2.
The NLI also has copies of Catholic registers. THE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH Presbyterianism
came to Ireland from Scotland with the first plantation of Ulster during the
early seventeenth century. Despite its support for the Williamite cause in Ireland
during the 1690s, the government and bishops were openly hostile towards
Presbyterianism. Its freedom of
action was severely curtailed by the Penal Laws, so that it was technically
illegal for Presbyterian ministers to perform marriages of members of their
congregation until 1782 and it was not until 1845 that they could legally marry
a Presbyterian and a member of the Church of Ireland.
These laws did not prevent Presbyterianism from becoming the predominant
denomination in Down; by 1861 Presbyterians made up 44.5 per cent of the
population of the county. Each Presbyterian congregation kept
registers of baptisms and marriages: in general, they start later than those of
the Church of Ireland. Additional
Presbyterian records available for consultation at PRONI include session books,
communicants’ rolls and lists of members who emigrated.
Because Presbyterians rarely kept burial registers, gravestone
inscriptions provide valuable information that cannot be found elsewhere.
It is also worth looking at Church of Ireland registers for baptisms,
marriages and burials involving Presbyterians. Another feature of Presbyterianism is the
number of places that have more than one Presbyterian Church, referred to as 1st,
2nd and 3rd. This,
together with the fact that congregations tended to split or secede, makes life
somewhat difficult for the researcher. Presbyterian records copied by PRONI are
available under MIC/1P and CR/3. A good place to start your research for
Presbyterian ancestors is the Presbyterian Historical Library is located at
Church House (Room 218), Fisherwick Place, Belfast.
The library has many manuscripts relating to Presbyterian families and
baptismal and marriage record of Presbyterian churches throughout Ireland. THE METHODIST CHURCH In
1738 John Wesley and his brother Charles started the movement that soon acquired
the name of Methodism. John Wesley
made his first visit to Ulster, where the movement had already established
itself in many of the major towns, in 1756.
He made regular visits to Ulster for the rest of his life.
The majority of Methodists were members of
the Established Church and they remained members of their own local churches. Therefore they continued to go to the parish church for the
administration of marriages, burials and baptisms. In 1816 a split developed between the Primitive Wesleyan
Methodists, who retained their links with the Established Church, and the
Wesleyan Methodists, who allowed their ministers to administer baptisms. The
majority of Methodist baptism and marriage registers do not begin until the
1830s and 1845 respectively. There
are very few Methodist burial registers, because Methodist churches rarely had
their own burial grounds. However,
an important record is a large volume of baptismal entries for Methodist
churches throughout Ireland deriving from the administrative records of the
Methodist Church in Ireland (PRONI MIC/429/1), which may have been the product
of an attempt to compile a central register of baptisms.
Although incomplete, it contains baptisms from 1815 to 1840 that often
pre-date the existing baptismal registers of Methodist churches. THE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS The Religious Society of
Friends, also known as ‘Quakers’ or ‘Friends’, originated in the
north-west of England in the mid-seventeenth century.
The Quaker movement was brought to Ireland by William Edmundson when he
established a business in Dublin in 1652. Initially the Quaker movement in
Ireland was almost entirely confined to English settlers, many of whom had come
to the country with the Cromwellian armies.
The initial concentrations were in Ulster, the richer agricultural areas
in central Leinster, isolated small urban centres like Wicklow and Carlow and
the major coastal trading cities such as Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Limerick.
Most of the early Quakers were engaged in agriculture and the linen
trade, later persecution of not paying tithes discouraged them from continuing
as farmers. By the mid
eighteenth century most Irish Quakers were artisans, shop-keepers, merchants,
and professional people. From the beginning Quakers were among the
best record-keepers. Monthly
meetings contain registers of birth, marriages and deaths, minutes of meetings,
accounts of sufferings and charity papers.
As a result, Quaker records contain a great deal of information about
local affairs. Quaker library at the Friends Meeting House, railway Street, Lisburn, County Antrim, contains records dating from the seventeenth century covering Ulster. Many records have been copied by PRONI and can be found under MIC/16. JEWISH
RECORDS Jews have lived in Ireland since at least the Middle Ages. In 1290 Jews were expelled from the dominions of the English Crown. They began to resettle in England from 1656 and in Ireland by the 1660s. Dublin had a rabbi by 1700 and a Jewish cemetery opened in 1718. By the middle of the eighteenth century Cork also had an organised community. By 1816 there were said to be only two Jewish families in Dublin. From the 1820s a new Jewish population appeared, mostly of German and Polish origin but coming to Ireland via England. A high proportion were goldsmiths, silversmiths and watchmakers and merchants. There numbers remained small, with only 393 Jews in 1861 and only 285 in 1871. From the 1880s there numbers were reinforced from eastern Europe, mainly because of persecution in Tsarist Russia and the present community is around 3,000. The former Walworth Road Synagogue on the Portobello, South Circular Road, Dublin, fell into disuse and ceased to function in the mid-1970's. The premises remained locked for almost ten years and were brought back to life again with the establishment of the Irish Jewish Museum Committee in late 1984. The Museum contains a substantial collection of memorabilia relating to the Irish Jewish communities and their various associations and contributions to present day Ireland. The material relates to the last 150 years and is associated with the communities of Belfast, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Limerick & Waterford.
|
