Everyone
still has something to learn, no matter how long you have been researching. And
it was no different for me when I attended the recent Researching Your Irish Ancestors seminar, put on by Unlock the
Past.
The two
speakers were David Rencher, Chief Genealogical Officer for FamilySearch, and Dr
Perry McIntyre, chair of the Great Irish Famine Commemoration Committee.
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| Dr Perry McIntyre (left) & David Rencher (right) |
About half
my Irish ancestors are Catholic, and the other half are Church of Ireland. I
have been lucky with some of these Church of Ireland families, in that the
records for their parish survived the fire of 1922. In at least one case I have
been able to view the original registers, which means that the parish could
prove they had somewhere safe to keep them and they were not submitted to the
Public Records Office and therefore not in the Four Courts Building in 1922. In
other cases I have seen poor quality microfilms, perhaps of the original
register, or perhaps of a copy retained when the original was submitted to the
PRO. In other cases the parish registers were amongst those which went up in
smoke. The families from those parishes have become some of my brick walls
What I
learnt was that the Vestry minutes were not part considered official public
records, and therefore were not in the PRO. There are two kinds of Vestry
Minutes: Select Vestry and General
Vestry. Any of these might have references to your ancestors, though they are
not likely to be references to exact baptism, marriage or burial records. But
if a person is mentioned at a certain point in time, then they were alive at
that point. Some lateral thinking might be required, but it might help.
Many of
these Vestry Minute Books are held at the Representative Church Body Library in
Dublin.
Another
lesson I learnt, which I really should have realized before, was that you
should still look in Church of Ireland records for your non-Church of Ireland
ancestors. This means not only the Catholics, but the Presbyterians,
Methodists, Congregationalists and so on. The reason for this is that the Church
of Ireland was the official State Church, and therefore had responsibility for
matters like probate, poor relief, local taxes and so on.
