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Irish Quaker sources and resources

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Researching Irish Quaker genealogy

These ideas are from the Ireland Quaker team which is part of the Irish Roots Topics Team in turn part of the Ireland Project and collaborates closely with the Quakers Project. Please contact me with any questions, comments, suggestions or ideas for things to add or improve.

For a short history of the Quakers in Ireland, see The Irish Quakers: A People's History. See also Early modern Irish sources.

For example profiles using these sources see Example profiles.

Contents

Introduction

Quakers in Ireland

You will find the official website of the Society of Friends in Ireland here. It advises you on how to join with the Quakers for worship or other activities and has sections on Quaker history (including notable Quakers, Quaker businesses and Quakers in action against war and famine) as well as on the Quaker Library and its archives.

The Society of Friends has an interesting blog (not restricted to Ireland) called Quaker Strongrooms, which includes, for example, this post on sources relating to Quaker women.

Approach to research

When researching Irish Quakers, the obvious place to start is with the Irish Quaker records themselves, although for most people and for the most convenient access this means paying a subscription. Apart from that, there are many other sources that can help your research. If you can't access the Quaker records you may find what you want in one of the other on-line resources. If the family you are researching was fairly well-off, then a will, deeds or other property records may be very useful. From the mid-18th century you may find interesting family notices in newspaper archives. From the mid-19th century you will find Ireland's free birth, marriage and death records as well as its probate calendar to be excellent as is the free 1901 and 1911 census. For older settlers in Ireland you may try the Cromwellian or other Planter records, and many families are covered in genealogies or biographies.

Please also see the Quaker project's resource page here and and the Ireland Project's external resources page here.

Dates

Until 1752, Great Britain, Ireland and the British colonies used the Julian Calendar. In this calendar, the new year started on Lady Day, March 25. Therefore the day after 24 March 1700 was 25 March 1701. This applied to people of all religions. Many historians restate dates as if they had been in the modern Gregorian Calendar. For example, King Charles I of England was executed on 29 January 1649. Many would re-state this as 29 January 1650. If you do not restate dates, then you will inevitably have problems for example where a child was born in December 1649 and died one month later in January 1649.

It is important to be sure which system of dates your sources use, and to be clear to readers of your profiles about which system of dates you have used. For example, you could use December 1649 and January 1650 for the child above, but mention January 1649 (1650) in the text or in a source citation.

Quaker dates are more complicated because Quakers use numbers rather than names for months. As others they followed the Julian Calendar before 1752 and the Gregorian calendar thereafter. Before 1752 March was 1 month, April 2 month, January 11 month and February 12 month. After 1752, January was 1 month, December 12 month etc. Some records created on or shortly after 1752 are labelled 'NS' to indicate the 'New System'.

It is important to remember that, before 1752, the whole of March was 1 month, even though the days 1-24 were in the old year and 25-31 in the new year. So the day after 1m 24 1700 was 1m 25 1701.

You can see more about Quaker dates here although the abbreviations described on that page do not apply to Irish Quaker records.

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General resources

FamilySearch Wiki

A good place to start in looking for sources is the FamilySearch Wiki. This will point you to records that are available on FamilySearch (which is free) and those in other places (some free, some requiring a subscription.)

Some useful sections of the Wiki are

John Grenham's website

Also containing a good overview of records on Ireland is the web site of Irish genealogist John Grenham. This link is to his listing of available records by category, civic registration, church records, census, land, deeds etc

National Library of Ireland

The National Library of Ireland has thousands of records that are invaluable to genealogists. Many of them are available on line and others can be located through the catalogue on its web site. The library has a useful booklet on family history research and its web site has sections on getting started and sources held by the Library.

Two key facilities are

  • The NLI's Sources search facility helps hunt down sources within the NLI's own collections and in collections around the world. For example it shows 'The papers of the Carleton, Chandlee and Shackleton families of Ballitore' (all Quakers) in the Haverford College Library. (Note: The NLI explains the background of 'Sources' here. The library has recently changed the search facility to try to get it to link directly to digital records in its own archives rather than just bring up text results. This is a worthwhile objective, but some of the changes just don't work, and results in the original document do not appear. FamilySearch has the whole of the original text with detailed explanation here. Sometimes you will get better results by browsing through it.)
  • The NLI's catalogue allows a search of its own collections, some of which are digitised and can be viewed on line. You can restrict your search to include only digitised collections.

The library includes a genealogical office/office of the herald. Its contents are available to search through the catalogue. Irish genealogist John Grenham wrote a Guide to the Genealogical Office (Irish manuscripts commission, 1998) and now available free from the IMC website. His web site shows what the genealogical office contains, which records provide indexes to others and which are available on line. He also provides a link to the records that are available on line, making this a most useful resource.

Sometimes, using these tools together produces the best results. For example, searching Sources for 'Newenham wills' shows that they are in 'National Library of Ireland, Genealogical Office: Ms.139, pp.182-7'. (See the note above; at the time of writing [August 2023] this search no longer works.) John Grenham's website shows that Ms 139 is indeed available on line and has a search using the Catalogue that links to it. You then just have to find the pages.

Another way to access the contents of the Genealogical Office is through a consolidated surname index to its contents prepared in book form by Virginia Wade McAnlis which is available to download from the NLI itself. You can use this to identify all the Office's manuscripts which contain a particular surname. As before, John Grenham's web site will tell you whether the ms concerned is available on line and if so point you to it.

Among the contents of the Genealogical Office are 27 volumes of registered pedigrees, mss 156-182, seventeen of which are available on-line. Unfortunately, the index to the pedigrees is not on-line, but the results seem to appear in 'sources' above and in Ms McAnlis's index. (The office also has other pedigrees, including the Betham and Sadleir pedigrees, but none of these is available on-line.)

Items in the Genealogical Office which are not available on-line can be found in the Mormons' Family History Centres.

National Archives of Ireland

The National Archives of Ireland has a helpful Family History guide/training course which has modules on surnames, place names, the census, civil records, church records, property and the military.

The genealogy section of its web site contains links to its various resources. These include important sources such as the will registers (described below), the census records (also described below), Catholic convert rolls (described in Rebellion, plantation and war) and marriage licence bonds. (An additional set of marriage licence bonds and probate records (for the diocese of Ferns) is available here, reprinted from the Journal of the Kildare Archeological Society.)

You can also search its online catalogue although this mainly contains only fairly recent material. (There are hard-copy catalogues to older material.)

Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

Equivalent records for Northern Ireland are held by The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.

PRONI has an excellent series of leaflets entitled 'your family tree' many of which are relevant to all Ireland research.

Two important ways into PRONI's records are its name search and eCatalogue. You can also browse the catalogue which can be useful if you know a reference number. It also has a tool for searching post 1858 wills and probate records described under Post-1858 wills and probate below.

PRONI has recently started a programme to digitise more of its collection. Most of the digitised images should be available to search via links updated here

Some of the recent additions include

  • a database of Ulster freeholders (in fact mostly leasholders, but in any case people entitled to vote because they held land). The database mainly draws on records of eligibility to vote or on votes cast. Most is 19th century but some 18th. The data often shows where the leasholder lived, who his (they are all male) landlord was, and gives information on the terms of their land holding
  • a large series of street directories for Ulster (some only Belfast) for years between 1819 and 1900
  • a copy of the Ulster Covenant of 1912 organised by Sir Edward Carson in which half a million Ulster protestants (whose names appear and can be searched) opposed losing their British citizenship under the then home rule proposals.
  • a vast set of records from Londonderry Corporation including freemen records, details of war memorials and minutes from 1673-1901.
  • valuation revision books complementing the original Griffith's valuation. (See Land records below.)
  • A large series of historical maps of the six counties starting in 1832.

A separate page also lists a series of digitised church records, although annoyingly most (perhaps all) of them only appear to be available on site. To check this out, use the browse search page of PRONI's e-catalogue. Enter the reference number that you want (eg CR6/19 for Hyde Park Methodist Church Mallusk, Co. Antrim) and keep clicking on the PRONI reference number on the left until you get to the lowest level.

Some records available through the e-catalogue are available on line to view remotely. These include the tithe applotment books described under Land records below and a set of workhouse registers from 1897 to 1921. The latter are available under refs starting BG7/GK/1. To find them enter this reference in the PRONI e-catalogue browse search page and hit the search button. You should then be able to view/download the registers for the years you choose. There may well be more useful records hidden away; there does not appear to be a complete list of them available.

Irish Manuscripts Commission

The Irish Manuscripts commission (web site) has many important books for sale, for example compilations of the submissions to the Royal Commission into the rebellion of 1641. It also makes some out-of-print works available free on line for consultation and download. These include Goodbody on Irish Quaker records, Ellis and and Goodbody on Irish wills from the register of deeds, the Pender Census of 1659 and important surveys of different provinces made in the 1660s.

Houses of the Oireachtas

The Irish Parliament has made its collection of historical documents available free on JSTOR here. Some 11,000 documents are split into two collections, the Dublin Castle Collection, 'The former reference library of the Chief Secretary’s Office in Dublin Castle, Ireland. Books, maps, periodicals, cartoons, manuscripts, prints and pamphlets dating from the late 16th to the early 20th century' and Oireachtas Historical Collections which include books and pamphlets from various sources.

Ask about Ireland

Ask about Ireland is a web site provided by Irish public libraries. As well as making the Griffith Survey available (see land records below), it has a large number of ebooks (such as Burke's Irish Family records) and many local histories (some cited in Irish local histories).

General

Wikipedia has a category for Irish Quakers although this is not linked to many articles.

When trying to find a specific resource - a book or a set of records - on line, as well as trying the obvious Google search, it is also well worth searching the FamilySearch catalogue. FamilySearch may have the item itself, and if not it may show you where else to find it.

Irish and Scotch-Irish Ancestral Research by Margaret Dickson Falley, Genealogical Publishing Co, Inc, Baltimore, 1981 is available to borrow on line from the Archive.org library. Volume 1 is a guide to different repositories of records and records on different topics whereas Volume 2 has an invaluable bibliography.

The 1922 fire and beyond

The event which most affects how we research Irish genealogy is the Four Courts Fire of 1922. All sorts of public records going back over hundreds of years were destroyed. Much of our research therefore involves hunting down copies, or abstracts made of various documents before they were destroyed.

Beyond 2022, an all-island international project now aims to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Civil War on June 30, 1922. This should include a single, searchable database including digital images and transcriptions of documents that survived the fire, have been salvaged, copies of which were held elsewhere, whose contents were copied before the fire and so on. Collaborators include The National Archives (Ireland), the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, The National Archives (UK), Trinity College Dublin and The Irish Manuscripts Commission, with contributions from many other libraries and archives in Ireland, The UK and the US. The project aims to launch this ‘virtual record treasury’ on June 30, 2022 – the centenary of the fire.

If the project achieves its aims, it will have a dramatic effect on research into Irish history in general and genealogy in particular. At present, the project’s web site is mostly about the process; a few examples give a glimpse of what might be available later. For example, there is an exchequer receipt roll from 1280, an interesting booklet on the Irish grand jury system, a guide to the contents of the public records office in 1919 and a rather clunky preview 3-d digital reconstruction of the old record treasury with ten documents as examples of what the new virtual treasury will contain.

You can read an Irish Times article about the ‘astounding’ success of the recovery of damaged documents here.

The virtual record treasury is now live. You can read about it in this freespace page.

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Irish Quaker Records

Irish Quakers have maintained detailed records from the mid 1650s to the present day, most of which survive. The records have long been available through the Quaker library in Dublin and on microfilm at the Mormons’ Family History Centres. For most researchers, however, the most useful way to access them is via FindmyPast, although this does involve a subscription or a per-item fee. FindmyPast has almost all the record books which still exist, although there are a few omissions, notably the books from the meetings in Bandon and Charleville (now absorbed into Cork) and some books recording births, deaths and marriages which were used as sources for the 1859 registers described below.

Database and browsing

The records on FindmyPast come from the Quaker archives in Dublin, Ulster Friends Trustees and the Friends' Historical Library Dublin (the latter data only; no images). For the two archives with data and images, the easiest way to find what you want is generally to search the database. You can, however, bypass the database and go directly to a list of the 903 volumes in the archive, choose a volume and then browse through its images. There are several good reasons for doing this:

  • Browsing the list of volumes is the best way to get an overview of the archive and a good place to start.
  • The list of volumes shows the archive reference and full name of each volume. The references can be used to narrow a database search, but are hard to interpret without the names. (The referencing system is explained here).
  • Some of the volumes, notably six books of wills, are only available through the browse option and not the database. Some of these volumes are listed here.
  • You may know which volume you want, but not find the entry in the database.
  • Most of the volumes have contents lists and/or indexes; browsing them can be useful.

However, FMP's browse function is not very user-friendly; it takes some time to page through the list of 903 volumes and without this you have to find the archive reference of the book you want to find, which is not easy. We have therefore created a table of all the books present in FMP's database including their names, with links to the FMP URLs. This may make it easier to find the book that you want.

Births, deaths and marriages - family lists

Until about 1850, the main records of genealogical interest were the family lists. At their most basic these contain the names of the parents and the details of their children’s births. Many of the lists also include the date and place of the parents’ birth and marriage and the names and abodes of their parents. As time went on, a further column was added for details of deaths. Many later family lists also contain information on the children’s marriages (if within the Quaker circle) and a cross-reference to their family list. Alternatively, they may tell you that one or more children resigned from the Society or was disowned.

Often bound in the same books were intricate marriage certificates, with details of the bride and groom, the pledges that they made to each other and where and when the wedding was held. These are usually followed by the signatures of all those present - a very useful resource for genealogists. Also in the same book were lists of deaths and burials not included in the family lists, eg for unmarried adults and often widows and widowers.

In some cases duplicate copies of the family lists, marriage certificates and lists of deaths were kept by both the monthly meeting and the quarterly meeting that it reported to. These copies may contain different and complementary information.

In the 1850s the Irish government required all religious bodies to place their records with the Public Records Office, but wanted them in the form of registers of births (or baptisms), marriages and deaths (or burials) held by most churches. The Quakers therefore constructed registers from their family lists. They gave copies to the Public Records Office, which were destroyed in the four courts fire of 1922 and kept copies for themselves. As many of the old family lists books were also old and in bad condition they copied these too, keeping the original format. After 1859, the Quakers started using various registers, birth, marriage and burial certificates as their main records. They supplemented these with membership records (see below) and stopped producing new family lists.

The collection on FindmyPast includes all the family lists, marriage certificates and registers of births, deaths and marriages that still exist. This is, however, not how the index is organised. It follows the traditional format of births, marriages and deaths, where each of the events mentioned in a family list is itemised separately. You can find a family list by searching for a birth, marriage or death mentioned in it. For couples that had children, the easiest way to find a family list is usually to search the FindmyPast births records, specifying the last name of the family and the first names of the mother and father.

For example in this search for children of Samuel and Elizabeth Watson, the first answer is Benjamin born 1690, who comes up nine times. One of these entries (described as ‘Edenderry MM family lists, births and burials 1612-1814’) is the original family list and is full of detail. There are also copy family lists held at the regional level (entitled Leinster QM births, marriages & burials 1650-99 (approx.)) and at another monthly meeting (entitled Wexford MM Burials 1659-1811, Family list 1641-1804) although these do not have as much detail. Two entries without images are from books held at the Quaker library and there are four different registers of births (eg entitled Register of births, EDENDERRY, 1859) which record Benjamin’s birth. The first two columns in the registers of births provide a reference to the family list used as its source. Similar searches for marriages and deaths will yield some of the same family lists and the marriage certificates and marriage and deaths registers. It is almost always best to use the form for the specific record-type that you are looking for (Search all records - specify Ireland - enter 'Quaker' and you will see a list).

It is best to refer to and cite the Family Lists where they exist, as they are the source records and the registers copies which may have introduced errors. They also clearly place family events in their context. We have compiled a table of sources to the registers. After about 1850, only the registers exist, and some of the context (the mother of x was herself the daughter of y and z) is lost. To a limited extent, this context can be found in membership records, which can be found under the general heading congregational records.

For some reason, the brief series of family lists for the Bandon meeting was neither transcribed into register in 1859 or scanned by FindmyPast. FindmyPast, does, however, have a copy of the lists made by Rosemary ffolliott which can be browsed here.

Congregational records

The category congregational records contains 1.5 million records of many different types. It is best to use the search for this specific record set so that you can see which register type you get or specify what you want.

  • Sufferings are the most complete and meticulously kept of the records. Organised alphabetically by person within county and year, they document periods of imprisonment, fines and seizure of goods from Quakers for refusing to pay tithes or close shops on Christmas day. They are often the best way to document that someone was a practising Quaker in a certain year.
  • Hidden by FindmyPast under the Sufferings heading is a volume of Testimonials to deceased ministers. A national meeting compilation of testimonials to deceased ministers can be found in archive ref Ym F1. Unfortunately an FMP search of this book does not distinguish between the subject of a testimonial and the signatories to it, but the book itself has a contents list which you can browse through. There are also testimonials scattered through the books of family lists.
  • Hidden by FindmyPast under the Minutes heading is a book listing the names of Friends in the ministry 1655-1781.
  • Register types disownments and disownments and testimonials contain disciplinary records of expulsions from the society or statements by individuals confessing to and repenting their misdeeds. This marvellous page, part of the index to the first book of disownments of the Mountmellick meeting, literally has alphabetical codes for the reasons for disownment, A=adultery, Br=breaking promises, Cr=cruelty, Di=disobienence to parents ... L=lukewarmness and loose conversation, etc
  • Register type membership contains books of membership of the different monthly meetings, mostly from after 1850. These are generally grouped by family. They show the members of a family, sometimes the relationships between them, how each person became a member (by birth, recruitment, or removal from another meeting), how (if relevant) they ceased to be a member and other observations. They are often one of the most useful genealogical records for the period concerned.
  • Register type minutes (almost 1m records) contains the minutes of the monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly meetings. The contents vary from banal to fascinating and can cover any subject. A person may appear in the index because of a subject of great importance or because they were delegated to write a letter. The 'minutes' also include account books, correspondence and miscellaneous documents. It is sometimes best to find the archive reference (see browsing above or check here) of a particular book (or books) and search that.
  • Type poor committee is what it says.
  • Type reference (no images) appears to contain file notes on various subjects made by members of the library staff.
  • Types deeds and museum are administrative in nature.
  • Types including words births, deaths, marriages and removals are mostly removal certificates and requests of approval to marry. (There are many similar entries under ‘minutes’.)

Migration records

The migration records mostly consist of removal certificates sent to or received from another meeting when a member moves between them, indicating that they are in good standing. There are also some administrative books showing progress of the process (sending a certificate, receiving an acknowledgment etc). There are also many records relating to re-settlement in the congregational records above.

School records

The format of the school records varies between different places and times. Many of the records contain the names of the pupils, their dates of birth, their parents' names and residences, the school that they attended, the dates of their attendance and where they left to (eg to return to parents). Not all pupils were Quakers - many families continued to favour the Quaker schools even after leaving the Society and were often allowed to attend. The school records therefore contain a very useful supplement to the general genealogical information. The record set also includes miscellaneous records such as visitors' and account books.

Wills

The Quaker archive contains seven volumes of wills and/or inventories and about a further 40 loose wills/inventories in various files. Six of the will volumes are in the Dublin archive and one is held in Lisburn by Ulster Friends’ Trustees.

All seven volumes of wills have been scanned by FindmyPast and are available through its ‘browse’ option, although only two of them (Wexford and Ballyhagen) are indexed, and then confusingly under ‘congregational records’; no such images are available of the loose wills. In their volume ‘Quaker Records Dublin, Abstracts of Wills’ , Eustace and Goodbody published abstracts of the six volumes of wills/inventories in Dublin and provided as appendices two lists, one of the wills/inventories held in Ulster and one of the loose wills/inventories in the Dublin archive. (Eustace & Goodbody is available free on Fáilte Romhat with some typos or on Ancestry.com. Cite as Eustace P.B, and Goodbody O. C. (Eds), Quaker Records Dublin, Abstracts of Wills, Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin, republished Clearfield & co, Baltimore, abstract [no] p [no] ([URL] : accessed [date]) ) In her later volume ‘Guide to Irish Quaker Records’ Olive Goodbody further published abstracts of the loose wills/inventories in the Dublin Archive (starting on p136), although there are some small discrepancies between the wills there and the list in the earlier volume. Abstracts of the wills held in Lisburn were made by Lieut.-Col J. R. H. Greeves and published in The Irish Genealogist, Vol. 2, No. 8, October 1950, although I do not believe that this is available on-line free of charge.

The seven will volumes available on FindmyPast are

Carlow Monthly Meeting copies of wills and inventories (1675-1740) (FMP ref MM I L1, E&G ref C.26 our ref CW)
Dublin Monthly Meeting wills and inventories (1683-1720) (FMP ref MM II L1, E&G ref D.4 our ref DW1)
Dublin Monthly Meeting wills and inventories (1721-1772) (FMP ref MM II L2, E&G ref D.5 our ref DW2)
Edenderry Monthly Meeting copies of wills and inventories (1645-1740) (FMP ref MM III L1, E&G ref E.15 our ref EW)
Mountmellick Monthly Meeting certificates of removal (includes wills at start) (1755-1795) (FMP ref MM V K1, E&G ref G.3 our ref MW)
Wexford Monthly Meeting certificates of removal (includes wills at end) (1749-1804) (FMP ref MM VI L1, E&G ref F.6 our ref WW)
Ballyhagen Monthly Meeting loose wills with inventories (late 17thc-early 18thc) (FMP/E&G ref BM5.1 our ref BW)

The links above should take you to the volume’s index or table of contents if it has one, or to the start of the section on wills otherwise.

Scattered through these volumes are various other documents, notably various memos relating to second marriages where the parties engage to provide properly for the children of the first marriage. These are not indexed by FMP and are not included in the various abstracts so are probably an unused resource.

FindmyPast has two further volumes which it describes as wills, but which really document visits to check whether Friends had made wills and put their affairs in order. These two volumes are

Dublin Monthly Meeting affairs and wills (1816-1850)
Dublin Monthly Meeting affairs and wills (1851-1855)

To help your search for these wills and inventories, we have constructed a combined index including the marriage memos. It is sorted in alphabetical order and includes a URL to take you to the relevant image on FMP.

If you don't find what you want, try the sources mentioned under Land records deeds and wills below, where we explain how to search non-Quaker records for wills.

Pedigrees

Quaker archivist Thomas Henry Webb drew on the contents of the Dublin archive to produce pedigrees of 232 Irish Quaker families. These were added to by his successor. My detailed knowledge is limited to the Watson pedigree, which unfortunately contains some errors. Each entry is, however, meticulously referenced to its underlying source, so that you can check their accuracy for yourself. Unfortunately FindmyPast has not included these pedigrees, and as far as I know they are only available at the Friends' Library in Dublin.

Citing Quaker records

Paul Hancock has developed an Excel spreadsheet to format citations of Irish Quaker records from FindmyPast which he will send out on request.

Guide to Irish Quaker records

The Irish Manuscripts Commission has published the Guide to Irish Quaker Records 1654-1860 by Olive Goodbody. This describes the system of record keeping used and lists the volumes available in each category. The registers described by Goodbody in the first part of her work are the same Dublin archives previously filmed by the Mormons and now available digitally on FindmyPast. The book also describes extra collections which are not available on line, for example sets of diaries and correspondence. It includes abstracts of 50 wills of Irish Quaker held in the archives which should be read individually in addition to Eustace and Goodbody. It also includes a list of the surnames mentioned in the registers. There is an appendix on records held in Northern Ireland which FindmyPast also includes. Cite as Goodbody O. and Hutton, B. G, Guide to Irish Quaker Records 1654-1860, Dublin, Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1967, p [p] (https://www.irishmanuscripts.ie/digital/guidetoirishquakerrecords/Guide%20To%20Irish%20Quaker%20Records.pdf : accessed [date])

Alternatives to Quaker records on FindmyPast

If you are serious about researching Irish Quaker ancestors and don't have a subscription to FindmyPast, then you are losing out. There are, however some alternatives:

  • Find a library with a subscription. Many libraries have one.
  • Search without a subscription. Limited but still useful information is available to search free on FindmyPast. You get more useful information by searching on the individual record set. For example searching on births gives you the names of the child and both parents, the meeting recording the birth and the birth year.
  • Go to the Quaker Library or a Family History Centre. The originals of the archive are held in the Quaker Libraries in Dublin and Lisburn and the Mormons have copies of a large part of it on microfilm, which is available in their Family History Centres. However these places also have free access to FindmyPast which would be easier to use.
  • Find subsets of records on line. Various subsets of the archive are available on line. For example Tom Laporte's web site (see below) contains extracts from various meetings' records of births, marriages and deaths.
  • Use Besse, Stockdale or Fuller for sufferings. If you can find these on line they are good substitutes for the Quaker Sufferings books which were their source.
  • Use Leadbeater for testimonies to early ministers. Leadbeater (see Quaker histories below) reprints edited versions of many of the early testimonies to ministers.
  • Use Wight & Rutty or some of the early Quaker journals for details of early Quaker pioneers.
  • Use the Annual Monitor for later testimonies and death records. The Annual Monitor 1818-1919 records deaths of Irish, British and US Quakers during those dates with their age and residence and sometimes their husband or wife. It also has detailed testimonies to ministers who died during those years. If you have a subscription, then searching on Ancestry.com is easiest, but you have to look under American records, even for Irish Quakers. FindmyPast also has the Annual Monitor under Directories and Almanacs - Quaker periodicals. The link shows where to find it if you don't have these.
  • Use the Ffolliott and Thrift collection abstracts of BMD records. Various genealogists made abstracts of information including Quaker records. Those of Ffolliot, Thrift and Crossle are held by the National Library of Ireland, although the easiest way to search them is ironically on FindmyPast. There is a copy of the Ffolliott collection in The Casey Collection.
  • Find books like Myers, Bewley and the Jackson genealogy which reliably quote or use the records themselves. Several books like these make extensive use of the Quaker records. Bewley cites them as sources for most of the entries in his pedigrees as do Myers and the Jackson genealogy.

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Quaker histories etc

There are many books on the early history of the Quakers as a religion and of individual members among them. Some general histories and histories specific to Ireland and Irish Quakers are listed below.

Overall histories

  • A history of the people called Quakers from their rise to the present time, John Gough, four volumes - volume 1 (1789), volume 2 (1789) (Chapter on Ireland begins on p 262), volume 3 (1789), volume 4 (1790) Cite as: Gough, J A history of the people called Quakers from their rise to the present time in four volumes Robert Jackson, Dublin, 1789-1790 Vol [vol] p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed]
  • A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers in Ireland Wight & Rutty Cite as: Wight, T and Rutty, J., A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers in Ireland, William Phillips, London, 1800, p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed]. It is also worth checking Wight's original version (with Rutty's additions as a supplement) which contains additional material. Cite as: Wight T., A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers in Ireland : from 1653 to 1700. To which is added a continuation ... to ...1751. With an introduction ... and a Treatise of the Christion discipline exercised among the said people by J. Rutty, I. Jackson, Dublin, 1751, p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed].
  • The beginnings of Quakerism by William Charles Braithwaite. Cite as: Braithwaite W C, The beginnings of Quakerism, MacMillan & Co, London, 1912.
  • Quakers in Ireland, 1654-1900 by Isabel Grubb. Some snippets available here. Cite as: Grubb, I., Quakers in Ireland, 1654-1900, Swarthmore Press, London, 1927
  • The Irish Quakers – A Short History of the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland by Maurice Wigham. See the Quaker Library, Dublin. Cite as: Wigham, Maurice J. The Irish Quakers – A Short History of the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland. 2nd Edition. Historical Committee of Friends in Ireland, Dublin, 2003.
  • Friends in life and death : The British and Irish Quakers in the demographic transition, 1650-1900 by Vann and Eversley [not available on line] Cite as: Vann, R. T. and Eversley, D. Friends in Life and Death: The British and Irish Quakers in the demographic transition, 1650-1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992

Quaker sufferings

  • The Great Cry of Oppression: Or, A Brief Relation of Some Part of the Sufferings of the people of God in scorn called Quakers, in Ireland, for These Eleven Years, Viz. from the Beginning of 1671 Until the End of 1681, William Stockdale. (Groups together the suffering books for those years also present in the Irish Quaker records, as do the Besse publications listed below.) Cite as: Stockdale, W The Great Cry of Oppression, Sufferings of Quakers in Ireland from 1671 to 1681 p [page]
  • Joseph Besse wrote several volumes on Quaker sufferings, listed in his wikipedia entry. Not all of these are available on line. A collection of the sufferings of the people called Quakers: for the testimony of a good conscience from the time of their being first distinguished by that name in the year 1650 to the time of the act commonly called the Act of Toleration granted to Protestant dissenters in the first year of the reign of King William the Third and Queen Mary in the year 1689, is available vol 1 and vol2 Cite as: Besse, Joseph A collection of the sufferings of the people called Quakers, Luke Hinde, London, 1753 vol [volume] p [page] [url of page] date accessed [date]
  • A Brief Relation of some part of the Sufferings of the True-Christians, The People of God (in scorn caller Quakers) in Ireland for these last Eleven Years, viz., from 1660 until 1671, Thomas Holme and Abraham Fuller Dublin, 1672. Cite as Thomas Holme and Abraham Fuller, A Brief Relation of some part of the Sufferings of the True-Christians, The People of God (in scorn caller Quakers) in Ireland for these last Eleven Years, viz., from 1660 until 1671, (Dublin, 1672), p [page number] [url of page] : accessed [date accessed]. Also a second edition A Compendious View of some extraordinary Sufferings of the people call'd Quakers both in person and substance in the Kingdom of Ireland, from the year 1655 to the end of the reign of King George the First, Fuller Abraham and Holms Thomas, printed Samuel Fuller, Dublin, 1731.

Journals of early Irish Quakers

Compendiums of Quaker biographies

  • Biographical notices of members of the Society of Friends, who were resident in Ireland Mary Leadbeater (mostly worked up from testimonies contained in the Quaker records). Cite as: Leadbeater, M Biographical notices of members of the Society of Friends, who were resident in Ireland Harvey and Darton, London, 1823 p [page ] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed]
  • Select Historical Memoirs of the Religious Society of Friends, Commonly Called Quakers by William Hodgson. Has sections on William Edmundson and the rise of Quakerism in Ireland, Quakers and the Williamite wars, Joseph Pike, the rebellion of 1798 and the separation in Ireland in 1799. Cite as: Hodgson, W, Select Historical Memoirs of the Religious Society of Friends, Commonly Called Quakers: Being a Succinct Account of Their Character and Course During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, J.B.Lippincott & Company, 1844, p [page number] [url of page] : accessed [date accessed].
  • Friends' Library, 14 volumes of journals, doctrinal treatises, & other writings of members of the religious Society of Friends. Most of the contents are available elsewhere (some listed above), but others may not be easy to find. Specific sections on Irish Quakers include Vol 2 (Clibborn, Edmundson, Pike, Watson, Wilson), Vol 3 (Sandham, Exham), Vol 5 (Penn), Vol 9 (Gough) and Vol 11 (Neale, Burnyeat). Many other sections also note Quaker ministers' visits to Ireland and mention Irish Quakers met there. Cite as: [Article name] in Evans, W and Evans T (eds) Friends' Library, vol [ ] p [ ], Joseph Rakestraw, Philadelphia, 1838 ([url]: accessed [date]).
  • A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Quakers by Richard S Harrison, Four Courts' Press, Dublin, originally published 1996 and revised and expanded in 2008 is unfortunately not available on line to the best of my knowledge, and only second-hand copies are available to purchase. There is information about it here Cite as: A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Quakers, Harrison

Other

  • The Leadbeater papers : the annals of Ballitore Mary Leadbeater in two volumes (includes letters from Edmund Burke) - volume 1, volume 2 cite as: Leadbeater, M The Leadbeater Papers - The annals of Ballitore in two volumes Bell and Daldy, London, 1862 vol [volume] p [page] [URL for page] accessed [date accessed]
  • A Narrative of Events, that Have Lately Taken Place in Ireland: Among the Society Called Quakers with Corresponding Documents and Personal Observations by William Rathbone mainly deals with the separation of 1797-1803. Cite as: Rathbone, W, A Narrative of Events, that Have Lately Taken Place in Ireland: Among the Society Called Quakers, McCreevy, London, 1804 p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed]
  • Immigration of the Irish Quakers into Pennsylvania, 1682-1750 : with their early history in Ireland Albert Cook Myers. Very useful and reliable volume using Quaker records from Ireland and Pennsylvania. Also has a history of Quakerism in Ireland. Cite as: Myers, A C, Immigration of the Irish Quakers into Pennsylvania, 1682-1750, the author, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1902 p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed]. By the same author Quaker Arrivals at Philadelphia, 1682-1750: Being a List of Certificates of Removal Received at Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends, Ferris & Leach, Philadelphia, 1902. Cite as: Myers, A C, Quaker Arrivals at Philadelphia, 1682-1750, Ferris & Leach, Philadelphia, 1902 p [page] [URL of page] accessed [date accessed].
  • Cork City Quakers 1655-1939: A brief history (not available on line). Cite as: Harrison, R., Cork City Quakers 1655-1939: A brief history. Cork, 1991, The Author. And more recently Merchants, Mystics and Philanthropists 350 years of Cork Quakers by the same author. Cite as: Harrison, R, Merchants, Mystics and Philanthropists 350 years of Cork Quakers, Sitka Press, Cork, 2006.
  • A rare work on Quaker women (not exclusively Irish) Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775 by Rebecca Larson (not available on line). Cite as: Larson R, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.
  • The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654-1921 by Helen E Hatton, McGill - Queen's University Press, 1993. Not available free on line.

For Quakers' role in alleviating the great famine see Quaker Relief Work in Ireland's Great Hunger by Robin Goodbody or Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of The Religious Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland in 1846 & 1847 both available from the Quaker Library, Dublin. This web page on History Ireland may also be of interest as are the records of the Quakers' Poor Committees, available on FindmyPast under 'Congregational Records'.

Also see the latest booklist from the Quaker library, Dublin.

Also see the sections on historical and academic journals and Genealogies of specific families of Irish Quakers below, and this list of journal articles concerning Irish Quakers.

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Genealogies including Irish Quaker families

Dictionary of Irish Biography

The Dictionary of Irish Biography is a useful, free and continually expanding on-line resource. Some of the Quaker families whose members are included are: Abell, Allen, Barcroft, Barrington, Beale, Bewley, Burnyeat, Cooper, Edmundson, Fisher, Foster, Greer, Greeves, Grubb, Hancock, Harvey, Haslam, Haughton, Hoare, Hobson, Horniman, Jackson, Jacob, Jellicoe, Leadbeater, Lecky, Newenham, Nicholson, Penrose, Perrot, Pike, Pim, Poole, Richardson, Russell, Rutty, Shackleton, Sharp, Story, Stott, Strangman, Todhunter, Tuke, Turtle, Webb, Wigham and Winter.

Burke group genealogies

See the Ireland project comments on peerage sources here for sources for real peers and qualifications about Burke publications/ThePeerage.com.

Burke's Irish Family Records (BIFR) published by the Burke's Peerage organisation in 1976 and edited by Hugh Montgomery-Massingbird is a compilation of genealogies of Irish families, many of which would have been referred to as 'landed gentry' in earlier editions. The entries in the book were prepared not by expert genealogists working for Burke, but by the families themselves. The quality of the work behind the entries therefore varies. In particular, many of the stories of the origins of families may have been overblown to exaggerate their importance or imply a link to nobility or simply through error. There are errors in the origins given for Quaker families Cuppage, Duckett and Watson at least and for the section on Grierson which implies a link with the Quaker Greers. Unfortunately, the book does not quote any sources, so one has to take or leave its contents on trust. Fortunately, many of the entries for more recent generations of the families covered have proved to be accurate when checked.

Quaker families covered include Barcroft, Cuppage, Duckett, Goodbody (but prefer the book cited below), Grubb, Greer, Greeves, Haughton, Newenham (although mostly not for the Quaker branch of the family), Penrose, Phelps and Watson (but prefer the book cited below). Cite as: [family name] in Montgomery-Massingbird, H, Burke's Irish Family Records, Burke’s Peerage, London, 1976 p [page] [URL for page] accessed [date accessed]

Where an entry in BIFR exists, it should be preferred as more up-to-date and probably more accurate than genealogies in earlier Burke editions. (If earlier generations are missed out in BIFR, it is because even the families didn't believe them.) However some families are only covered in earlier editions which may offer some help.

Sir Bernard Burke's A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland (1912) includes Quaker families Clibborn, Lecky, Nicholson, Pike and Strettle that are not included in BIFR. Cite as: [family name] in Burke, Sir Bernard A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland, Harrison and sons, London, 1912 p [page], [url of page] accessed [date accessed].

Some Quaker families such as Goff also feature in Burke's Peerage. Cite as: [family name] in Burke, Sir Bernard A and Burke, Ashworth, Burke's genealogical and heraldic history of peerage, baronetage and knightage, Harrison and sons, London, 1914, p [page] [url of page] accessed [date accessed].

Website thepeerage.com forms a searchable index to these and other genealogies. Try searching for the name that you want in Google adding the tag site:thepeerage.com. eg Elizabeth Lecky Watson site:thepeerage.com. The advantage of this approach is that you will often find what you want and it will tell you which of the publications to look in and on which page. But beware, because ThePeerage very occasionally introduces new errors and it often uses sources even less reliable than Burke's eg email to Darryl Lundy from xyz. Try to check the real source rather than citing ThePeerage.

Other

  • Regarded as unreliable by some is Crisp’s visitation of Ireland. Quaker families covered include Cooper, Greer and Greeves (but prefer Burke for the latter two Vol 1 Carroll, Vol 2 Bewley (but prefer The Bewleys of Cumberland), Fuller and Shackleton Vol 4, Vol 5.
  • Also regarded as unreliable are O'Hart's Irish pedigrees; or, The origin and stem of the Irish nation. (See John O'Hart, hero and villain.) The fifth edition is in two volumes and there is also a supplement when Cromwell came to Ireland with additional pedigrees and a series of appendices with useful information (see Rebellion, plantation and war).
  • The linen houses of the Bann Valley : the story of their families by Kathleen Rankin (Belfast, Ireland : Ulster Historical Foundation, 2012, 2007) includes sections on Irish Quaker families Bell, Christy, Greer, Greeves, Haughton, Malcomson, Nicholson, Richardson, Sinton and Uprichard.
  • A compendium of Irish Biography by Alfred Webb (M H Gill & sons, Dublin, 1878) includes a small number of Quakers - Burnyeat, Edmundson, Gough, Harvey, Jacob, Leadbeatter (Shackleton) and Rutty.
  • Thom's Irish Who's Who (1923) contains short biographical pieces on 'prominent men and women in Irish life'. It is available at Wikisource and archive.org. Names of (former?) Quaker families whose members are covered include Carroll, Cherry, Cooper, Garrett, Greer, Hogg, Penrose, Pike, Pim, Richardson, Webb.
  • The Peerage of Ireland by John Lodge (1692-1774) is as reliable as any other published genealogy, although some parts drawing on previously existing pedigrees have been shown to be wrong.
  • The Dictionary of Ulster Biography now free and on line, mostly has very short (one paragraph) unsourced articles on noted figures from the nine counties of Ulster from the 19th-21st centuries. Some articles are longer and point to fuller biographies elsewhere; some people from earlier periods are covered. 24 biographies contain the word 'Quaker'.

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Genealogies of specific families of Irish Quakers

  • The Barclays of New York by R Burnham Moffatt mainly covers that family there and their Scots ancestors but also has a chapter on their Irish Quaker cousins.
  • The Barringtons: A family History Amy Barrington, Dublin, Ponsonby and Gibbs, 1917, appears to be a very well researched history and genealogy of various branches of the Barrington family, including the Quaker family of Wexford and Wicklow. It includes extracts of a large number of wills, court documents etc which no longer exist.
  • Ringing True - The Bells of Trummery': A Quaker family through 350 years, Bill Jackson, William Sessions, 2005 (out of print?)
  • The Bewleys of Cumberland and their Irish and other Descendants by Sir Edmund Thomas Bewley (then a retired judge) is an encyclopaedic work with pedigrees covering almost two thousand members of the Bewley family, most of them Irish Quakers. Unlike the Burke publications mentioned above, Sir Thomas clearly shows his sources, many of which are Quaker records from Ireland and Cumberland. One should ideally cite the main text (with page if relevant) and the specific pedigree or pedigrees in which a person appears. Cite as: Bewley, Sir Edmund Thomas. The Bewleys of Cumberland and their Irish and Other Descendants. Dublin: William McGee, 1902 main volume [p page if relevant] and pedigree [?] [url] accessed [date accessed]
  • Tom LaPorte's excellent web site covers everything to do with the Boles or Bowles family. The link given here is to the Boles family of Tipperary, which is the main Irish Quaker branch of the family. It also includes many of their Watson descendants. Tom quotes his sources meticulously and allows you to see them. He also has a free-to-view set of images and transcripts of Quaker Birth, Marriage and Death registers (but not family lists) from each of the monthly meetings and for each of the letters of the alphabet covering the families that he writes about.
  • The Goodbodys, Millers, Merchants and Manufacturers : the Story of an Irish Quaker Family 1630-1950 by Michael I A Goodbody and Michael Fewer is a thorough and excellent treatment of this prominent Quaker family. Also The Goodbody Family of Ireland by Michael Goodbody, self published, 1979 (out of print?)
  • The Grubbs of Tipperary; Studies in heredity and character by Geoffrey Watkins Grubb. Mercier Press, 1972 is also apparently out of print.
  • There are two or three genealogies of the Hewetson family (only a few of whom were Quakers). The most useful is probably The memoirs of the House of Hewetson or Hewson by John Hewetson (1901)
  • Some account of the Early History and Genealogy of the Families of Hore and Hoare, by Edward Hoare, Alfred Russel Smith, London, 1883.
  • The proceedings of the sesqui-centennial gathering of the descendants of Isaac and Ann Jackson together with their family genealogy presents a detailed and reliable genealogy of this Quaker family and their descendants in Ireland and America.
  • A History of the Families of Jacob of Bridgwater, Tiverton, and Southern Ireland Henry W. Jacob Wessex Press, 1929, also out of print. Also A Jacob Family : Tramore in the 1900s, Philip R. Jacob, 2008.
  • The Penrose Family of Wheldrake, Yorkshire, England and Ballykeen, County Wicklow, Ireland together with their known descendants in the British Isles and the United States of America to 1961, by George E McCracken, Des Moines, 1961.
  • Francis Bewley Pim wrote The Genealogy of the Pim Family in 1980. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a copy.
  • The Richardsons of Bessbrook: Ulster Quakers in the Linen Industry (1845-1921), Richard S Harrison, (the author, 2009). Also The Richardsons of Bessbrook - A Quaker Linen Family John Bradley, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society Vol. 22, No. 2 (2009), pp. 159-191 (33 pages)
  • Six generations of Friends in Ireland by Jane Marion Wakefield Richardson (1894) details a single line of descent over six generations of members of the Wilson, Wakefield and Richardson families.
  • The Watsons of Kilconnor, County Carlow - 1650-present by Peter J F Coutts and Alan Watson (2019) covers many branches of this family which was firmly in the Quaker camp from 1650 until its members gradually drifted away mostly in the 19th century.

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Historical and academic journals

This section lists and provides links to various journals which are likely to contain articles and papers relevant to Irish Quaker genealogy. They vary enormously, from serious, professional academic works to the writings of amateur enthusiasts, so take care to judge the quality of the research. Good papers cite their sources, some of which you will be able to check for yourself. Perhaps more importantly, some cite sources destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire, and may contain information no longer available anywhere else.

A short but growing list of articles related to Irish Quaker genealogy published in these journals on topics is available here.

Some of the journals are available free from their own web sites. (Most require a subscription for at least the most recent editions.) Three have excellent search facilities. Many are also available on JSTOR which also has its own search facility. (They may also be present on Archive.org or Google Books.) Unfortunately, some of the journals have no free access that I have found and no useful search facility.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit digital library mainly for academic journals. It is widely used by universities, libraries and academics and charges subscriptions. However, any individual can open a free account and view/download up to 6 articles per month without charge (100/month during the covid pandemic). You may be able to view more at your local library. Many journals restrict free access to their most recent editions.

Quaker history/genealogy

Irish genealogical journals

  • Irish Family History Journal (Journal of the Irish Family History Society 1980-date) (not found on line without subscription).
  • The Irish Genealogist (journal of the Irish Genealogical Research Society 1937-date) (not found on line without subscription or one-off payment of £4.00 per article). Also available from IRGS The Irish Ancestor (1969-1986) edited by Rosemary Ffolliott
  • North Irish Roots (journal of North of Ireland Family History Society 1984-date) also on JSTOR.
  • The Genealogical Society of Ireland (2000-date) (not found on line without subscription).
  • Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review (Journal of the The Ulster Genealogical & Historical Guild established by the Ulster Historical Foundation - 1985-date - Also publishes the Directory of Irish Family History Research) (not found on line without subscription or one-off payment of £4.00 per article)
  • Genealogists Magazine (journal of the Society of Genealogists [of the UK] (dates?) some available on archive.org.
  • Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead, Ireland - 1888-1938. 1888-1934 available on FamilySearch (no OCR, not searchable). 1888-1916 available on archive.org (with OCR, searchable). Full Index of entries for County Clare c/o Clare Library. The main content was gravestone transcriptions, but many entries included more, such as family information, pedigrees, coats of arms, funeral entries and sometimes wills. More explanation and links to the tables of contents/indices of individual volumes and various finding aids on web site memsdead.
  • Not solely Irish and not strictly a genealogical journal but Notes and Queries (1849 - present, now a serious academic journal published by Oxford University Press) was originally "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc". It's first 70 years of journals hold much of genealogical interest. They can be found, for example on Hathi trust.
  • In a similar vein is Miscellanea Genealogica Et Heraldica

Irish historical journals

Irish local history societies’ journals

See also Irish local histories.

Other sources and list of interesting articles

  • Irish History On Line (not a journal but a compendium of sources on Irish history produced by the Royal Irish Academy). This search retrieves all the journal articles in the database with keyword 'Quaker.'
  • British History On Line (a resource provided by the Institute of Historical Research/School of Advanced Study, University of London, makes 1,300 volumes of primary and secondary sources available on-line [a few requiring a subscription], including much relevant to Ireland).
  • The North of Ireland Family History Society has a longer list of potentially relevant journals.
  • From Ireland also has a list of Irish journals for genealogists.
  • John Grenham’s website has links to Irish historical and genealogical societies, many of which have their own newsletters, pamphlets etc and some make valuable genealogical resources available on line.
  • This JSTOR search brings up journal articles on Irish Quaker history (and lots of others).
  • This web site links to archeological and historical Irish journals.

A growing list of articles relevant to Irish Quakers extracted from some of these journals is available here.

This JSTOR category includes all the journals relating to Irish Studies available there. The journals include many historical journals and journals of local history societies listed above as well as literary, social and other journals.

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Land records, legal records, deeds and wills

Wills and probate

Introduction

Until 1858 probate, or proof of the validity of a will, was issued by church courts. Larger estates and all that included assets in more than one diocese were covered by the Prerogative Court of Armagh; others by local dioceasan courts. (Wills of the largest estates which had assets in England, Scotland or Wales were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.) The courts kept a copy of the will in a register which also recorded probate. A calendar was produced which showed which wills had been approved by which court in which year. After 1858, probate became a civil matter. Local registries or the principal registry in Dublin prepared will registers (or copies of wills) and produced a probate calendar which was published and which contained some details on who had died, where and when and who was granted the right to administer the estate.

The records of the church courts and the principal will registers produced by the local registries were centralised in Dublin, where they were all destroyed in a fire in 1922. Original wills held by families or solicitors may still exist, as do some copies of will registers not sent to Dublin (ie none proved in the Principal Registry in Dublin). Some 'genealogical abstracts' of wills were also made and can be viewed. There are at least two indexes to available wills and abstracts. Also available are the will and probate calendars. Furthermore, because the affected ownership of land, many wills were registered as deeds and memorials of them can be found in the Deeds Registry (see below).

The FamilySearch wiki has a detailed explanation of what is available as does John Grenham's website.

Pre-1858 wills and probate

The will calendars for the period before 1858 can be viewed through the National Archives of Ireland here. If there is a date in the column 'Year of Will' for an early year, then you will be able to click through to see the will itself. (In most cases this column is blank.) In later years, a date may really indicate a calendar (listing) of wills, and you will have to click through to see whether there is a will as well.

A small number of Prerogative wills held by the National Archives of Ireland are now available on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under archive ref NAI PRCT/1. Search here adding a relevant keyword. These wills appear not to show up in the search on the NAI's web site above.

The Public Records office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) holds some further pre-1858 wills not available in the National Archives of Ireland. To look for these, use PRONI's name search. NB that this is worth doing even for wills from what is now the Republic of Ireland. If you find an entry for the will concerned, then the results should tell you that the will either does or does not exist. If it does exist, you should be able to see a little more about it by using the eCatalogue. Annoyingly, just copying the PRONI reference from the name search results to the eCatalogue does not work as the formats are slightly different. If the first search gives you a reference T/808, then enter T808 to search the eCatalogue. Slashes other than the first should be retained. D/1044/860 should be entered as D1044/860. Alternatively, you can search on D1044 to see a description of the whole series, D1044/* to see all the items in the series or D1044* to see the top-level description and all the items. The browse function also lets you see the items underneath each heading. Unfortunately, very few of PRONI's wills are available on-line, but the archive description available through the eCatalogue occasionally contains a summary; otherwise you can visit PRONI in Belfast or order a copy of a will for a fee. One important source of wills in PRONI is the Tenison Groves collection discussed with other genealogical abstracts below.

Canterbury court wills are held by the UK National Archives and have all been digitised. The National Archives will make a digital copy of a will available for a fee. Access to these wills is also included in an Ancestry subscription. (The National Archives' search is much better than Ancestry's; try there if you can't find what you are looking for.)

Beyond 2022 - Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury has a series of pointers from the UK National Archives to its holdings of wills proved in the Canterbury Court for testators resident in Ireland, under code TNA PROB 11. Search here to see all 4152 results and add a relevant keyword to find pointers to individual wills. You can then find the will itself on The National Archives Discovery or on Ancestry.com.

Post-1858 wills and probate

PRONI has an excellent on line facility to view both wills and probate records post 1858. It is free to use. Only copies of wills that had not been sent to Dublin and therefore escaped the Four Courts fire are available, but fortunately there are a lot of these for northern Ireland.

There are two applications to do the same thing for the Republic of Ireland the will registers and the probate calendars

Genealogical abstracts

Several genealogists made 'genealogical abstracts' of wills before they were destroyed - ie abstracts containing only the genealogical information in the will, names of spouses, parents, children etc mentioned, and not details of bequests. Most of these focused on the prerogative court of Armagh. Most useful are the Betham abstracts made by the former Ulster Herald. Some of these are available on line at the National Library of Ireland and at FamilySearch but are not searchable there. The easiest way to search them is on FindmyPast. Otherwise try the McAnlis surname index to the contents of the NLI's Genealogical Office to find which volume your will might be in. (See National Library of Ireland above.)

Ancestry.com has recently added a record set Ireland, Abstracts of Wills and Marriages, 1620-1923 which says that it includes the abstracts made by Betham, as well as those of Thrift and Crossle. (See below for Thrift and Crossle.)

Betham also made abstracts of almost all Kildare wills up to the date 1827. These are available on FamilySearch.

Other series of abstracts cover the same wills as Betham and are mostly not so useful. Some are, however, available free as an alternative or complement to Betham. The best of these is probably the Fisher notebooks, three out of five of which are available on line at the NLI here. Unfortunately, these do not include the index. However, this MS is indexed in Sources, so you can start there to find the right volume and page, and they have recently been indexed by FindmyPast. (These and other Fisher notebooks are also available on microfilm at the Mormons' Family History Centres, catalogue entry here.) Further series of abstracts by Francis and Philip Crossle and Gertrude Thrift are more hit and miss, but are available on FindmyPast (Thrift, Crossle) and FamilySearch (Thrift and Crossle). When they were researching a particular family, Thrift and the Crossles sometimes copied wills and other documents verbatim; it is worth checking for these copies. Irish Genealogist W H Welply also made copies or abstracts of a large number of wills. These are held in the Library of the Society of Genealogists/Irish Genealogical Research Society in London. IRGS has a brief "card index" summary of them here. Unusually, they include many non prerogative wills. Many of the Welply wills for Munster are also available in The Casey Collection.

Tenison Groves, a genealogist and archivist who worked for many years for the Public Records Office of Ireland in Dublin, produced a further large collection will abstracts. PRONI holds a many of his papers under ref T/808, including copies of many wills made before the 1922 fire. These have been microfilmed by the Mormons - catalogue entry here and are available at Family History Centres. A PRONI name search should give you the page number for the will you are looking for. Two volumes of Groves' papers which include copies and abstracts of some wills have recently been made available on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under refs PRONI T808/2952 (containing pages 2952-3183) and PRONI T808/8170 (containing pages 8170-8326). One hopes that other volumes will be added. These are not easy to use. At the time of writing, these volumes have not been scanned using the Treasury's OCR system, so that neither the overall search function nor the function to search within a volume works. The best approach is as above, to start with a PRONI name search. For example, if you search for the name 'John Chambers' you will find various entries including one in Dublin shown to exist under PRONI ref T/808 p.3181. As this is in one of the page ranges now included in the Treasury, you can open that volume and browse to the page concerned.

Rev Canon William Carrigan made a large number of abstracts of wills of Irish Catholic families. These are deposited in the archives of St. Kieran's College, Kilkenny and indexed in The Irish Genealogist Volume 4, No. 3 (1970), pp.221-242. Many of the will abstracts were published in Achivium Hibernicum vols I-IV (1911-1915) and can be read on JSTOR. The same volumes have recently been made available on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury via the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland.

Genealogist Rev Henry Biddall Swanzy also made abstracts of wills, available at the Society of Genealogists Library and in the National Library of Ireland, where they are not on line. Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury has two volumes of Swanzy's abstracts (under archive refs COA IrMss/7 and COA IrMss/8) with placeholders containing no data for two other volumes (COA IrMss/9 and COA IrMss/10). The final placeholder (with no data) is for the main set of Swanzy's abstracts of prerogative wills. The two sets of records that do have data are for a mixture of wills, deeds and court documents relating to families that Swanzy was investigating. You can browse or search the volumes here and here. Many of his abstracts were for the same wills as those made by Rev Leslie, described below.

Bernard Burke made a large collection of wills for forming Irish pedigrees. They are held by PRONI (archive ref T559 which includes its own index). Unfortunately they are not available on line. FamilySearch has a copy of them on film but this is only available to consult in a Family History Centre.

Rev Canon James Blennerhassett Leslie (author of a large number of works on the history and clergy of the Church of Ireland) made abstracts of about 700 Irish wills. These are held by PRONI and have recently been made available by Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under ref PRONI T1075/12. Because of the author's area of research, it is likely that many of these are for Church of Ireland families. The wills are in alphabetical order which may help to find what you want, but at the time of writing they have not been read into text by the Treasury or included in its index, so the search there will not help. And despite the fact that they are held by PRONI, the few tests that I carried out were not included in PRONI's name search, so there is no help from that end either. Many of these wills are the same as those in the Swanzy collection.

Sybil Kirkpatrick made transcriptions of the wills of Irish medical doctors which she donated to the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. They are available on Ireland's virtual record treasury under archive ref RCPI TPCK 5/3/1. (These form part of a larger set of biographical files held by the Royal College which are available to search on Ancestry.)

Some 7,500 abstracts are held in the Genealogical Office of the National Library of Ireland (including many of those discussed above). In principle, all should appear in the McAnlis surname index, and all the abstracts other than Betham's have been indexed by Beryl Eustace/Wallace Clare. (See below.)

Miscellaneous testamentary records

After the Four Courts Fire in 1922, the Public Records Office (now National Archives) went about collecting copies of all the testamentary records - wills, records of probate or administration, inventories of the estates of deceased people, inheritance tax records, related deeds etc - that they could find. These related to both the church system before 1858 and the civil system after that date. Some of the wills and registers that they collected form the basis of the records put on line by the National Archives and described above.

A huge number of other miscellaneous records still exist in the National Archives, supported by a card-index system. The cards are in alphabetical order and give you a reference number (a T number) for the main record. Both the original documents and the card index have been copied by the Mormons and are are now available on line on FamilySearch. You can see the card index here and the main documents here. For example, browsing the card index for Watson leads to an entry for my relative John Watson (1742-1793). The reference number (T17628) leads to a copy of his will here.

The card index system sometimes also points to wills in other collections such as those of Crossle and Thrift described above. The collection also includes a large number of entries relating to marriage licence bonds.

FindmyPast has also recently added a search on the card index and other sources (described more fully below). This does not include an image of either the card index itself or the underlying record, but is a quicker way to search the index than browsing through the FamilySearch film. FMP's search gives you the name of the person concerned, the date, county and the nature of the document (will, probate etc). When the detail shows a T reference, you can then use it to find the underlying document on FamilySearch, although annoyingly FindmyPast does not tell you this.

Some of the wills included in the miscellaneous testamentary records above have now been made available on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under archive ref NAI PRIV/M/2745. There should be many hundreds more to add. (They are listed (with no detail) by the NAI here.)

Forces and other

Copies of wills may exist in other places. For example, the National Archives of Ireland has a facility to search for soldiers' wills.

Wills (and other records) of Irish people who were officers in the UK forces may be held by the UK National Archives and available in War Office Series 42.

Similarly wills and papers of those who worked for the Honourable East India Company may be available in its papers (available at the British Library and on FindmyPast.)

Numerous other wills exist in private collections. One example of these is the papers of the Brabazon family (Earls of Meath) of Killruddery House, Wicklow. Their 'Mr Stone's Book' including wills, deeds and other documents, is available on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under archive ref Killruddery BM/A/3/3.2.

Many references to wills were made in Irish inquisitions post-mortem and on attainder. Indeed the Irish Records Commission prepared transcripts in English of deeds and wills cited the inquisitions, but, with one exception, these have never been published. The exception is the transcripts for Dublin published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission, but not yet available free.

A couple of wills available in Longford archives are available on the Virtual Record Treasury under ref LongfordCA Wills. Browse from here.

Tax records

Inheritors of substantial estates had to pay tax on the legacies they received, so the Inland Revenue kept details of wills, probate judgements, inventories of assets etc. FamilySearch has some records which are available on line here. These records are named as Irish will index, 1838-1879: Irish administration register,1828-1839: and Irish administration index, 1828-1879.

A set of records called 'Ireland, Inland Revenue Wills & Administrations 1828-1879' has recently been made available on FindmyPast. This is very probably the same records as on FamilySearch and will be more useful to FMP subscribers as they are fully searchable.

In both sets of records, the registers for 1828-1839 are much the most interesting. These include details of the testator, the executor and the beneficiaries of the wills and often a summary inventory of the testator's assets. The records for other years are just indexes with much less information.

Indexes and other

An index to all the prerogative wills made by Sir Arthur Vicars is available here.

A series of Indexes to wills from the prerogative and dioesean courts was produced by WPW Phillmore and Gertrude Thrift. The indexes are available to consult on FamilySearch (Ossory, Leighlin, Ferns, Kildare, Cork & Ross, Cloyne, Cashel & Emly, Waterford & Lismore, Killaloe & Kilfenora, Limerick, Ardfert & Aghadoe, Dromore, Newry & Mourne and Derry, Raphoe) and Ancestry and can all be searched on FindmyPast.

The Deputy Keeper of Public Records published (in three volumes) an index to the Grant and Will Books of the Diocese of Dublin (links here, widely available on line).

These indices are useful because they list all the wills proved in these courts, many of which now do not exist. All of these indexes are available to search on FindmyPast which is probably the most convenient place to search if you have a subscription.

An index to copies and abstracts of wills surviving after the fire and available in the Genealogical Office of the National Library of Ireland was produced by genealogist Beryl Eustace and published in Analecta Hibernica. The index tells you which series contains the abstract concerned. (The same index is also included in the Guide to the Genealogical Office, which can now be downloaded free from the Irish Manuscripts Commission.) Beryl Eustace's work built on a similar index produced by the Reverend Wallace Clare can be bought from genealogical.com or consulted on Ancestry. Neither of these indices includes the abstracts made by Betham. You may be able to find the series on FindmyPast or Ancestry (Betham, Crossle, Thrift) in the Casey Collection (Welply) or elsewhere. John Grenham's website will show you which of the Genealogical Office's collections are available on line.

FindmyPast has recently added an index to surviving Irish wills 1484-1858 (and marriage licence bonds), which overlaps with the Eustace and Clare indices described above. FMP has a supplementary page explaining the reference codes used in its results which detail its sources. These include the will and probate abstracts made by Thrift and Crossle (available on FMP itself, on Ancestry and on FamilySearch), other genealogical abstracts, sources like the Landed/Encumbered Estates Court and the Inland Revenue Will Registers (both also available on FMP), the very small number of wills 'salved' from the fire of 1922 (available on Ireland's virtual record treasury) and the large set of miscellaneous testamentary records (with a T reference) held by the National Archives of Ireland and available on FamilySearch. (See above.)

Another surviving source of many wills post 1709 is the registry of memorials of deeds (covered next). You can search for wills covered there. Fortunately Eilish Ellis and Beryl Eustace have done this for you. Their three-volume set of abstracts of wills from the registry of deeds is available from the Irish Manuscripts Commission here and on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury vol 1, vol 2 and vol 3.

See the section on wills in the Quaker archive above for information on what is available there.

Miscellaneous journal articles

Various wills and will abstracts have been published in journals over the years. Some of these are specific to the family concerned and will have to be searched individually. (See Historical and academic journals above.) Journals said to include fairly large numbers of Irish wills include

Some other specific publications (copied from John Grenham's web site) are listed below

  • Four wills of old English merchants in Drogheda on JSTOR.
  • Indexed List of Wills of Residents in Dundalk and District on JSTOR
  • Extracts from Original Wills Formerly Preserved in the Consistorial Office, Cashel, but Now Removed to the Court of Probate, Waterford on wikimedia and on JSTOR
  • Index Testamentorum olim in Registro Corcagiae, 1600-1802 (Index of in testaments registered in Cork) Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society
  • Abstracts from Ossory & Leighlin Admons., The Irish Genealogist (1972). (Not available free without a subscription.)
  • Some old Limerick wills on Limerick Libraries
  • Extracts from Meath priests wills 1658—1782, published Riocht na Midhe, Vol. IV, No. 1, 68—71 (1967). (not found on line).
  • Wills relating to Waterford in Decies vols 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23 at Waterford Libraries

Please let me know of others.

Approach to searching

With so many potential sources, it is hard to know where to start, particularly for pre-1859 wills. I suggest the following approach.

  1. Look in one or more of the main indices of wills proved. The best of these are on FindmyPast (which has the Phillmore/Thrift Indexes, the Dublin Will & Grant Books, the Vicars Index and the original will calendars), the National Archives of Ireland (which has the original calendars now also copied on Ancestry) and PRONI (which has its own name search). Indeed, each of these searches has its own advantages in other ways. The NAI may occasionally take you to the original will; FMP has its own index to surviving wills/abstracts, copies of the abstracts by Betham and others and some tax records (be sure to check under 'pedigrees' as well as 'wills/probate'). Ancestry now also has the Betham and other abstracts, an older index to surviving wills and the Canterbury wills. PRONI has the best index to the large Groves collection. There is guidance on all of these sources above.
  2. For Canterbury wills, use Ancestry or the UK National Archives; there is a list of relevant wills in the virtual record treasury.
  3. If you find that the will was proved in the Prerogative Court, then there will more often than not be a Betham Abstract. These are easiest to find on FindmyPast, now available on Ancestry too and also on the National Library of Ireland and FamilySearch, but harder to find there.
  4. To find a Kildare will, look on FamilySearch.
  5. To find Quaker wills look in the section on Quaker records above; for Catholic wills try Carrigan above and for CoI clergy try Leslie; for doctors try Kirkpatrick, for soldiers the NAI and for military officers/East India employees try The National Archives or FindmyPast.
  6. To find other wills/abstracts that might still exist, try Beryl Eustace's index to those in the Genealogical Office or the rather older and less complete index by Wallace Clare, which Ancestry has. These will point you to places like the Swanzy, Fisher, Welply and other collections, some of which are now available on line. (Note that this index will not point you to wills in the Groves collection, but that a PRONI name search will.)
  7. Look next for wills in the Registry of Deeds in the summaries by Ellis and Eustace.
  8. If you have no luck with any of these, try the miscellaneous testamentary records and tax records on FamilySearch (although if you have FindmyPast, a search there will already have pointed you to these.)

Finally, you may find abstracts of wills in journal articles, histories or genealogies covering the family concerned or in other sources like the land courts.

Thanks to John Falvey for help improving this section.

Registry of deeds

All land transactions in Ireland need to be in the form of a deed, and since 1709 a memorial or summary of each deed needs to be registered for it to be legally enforceable. The Registry of Deeds still exists, in Henrietta Street, Dublin, now part of the Property Registration Authority.

All the memorials of deeds still exist. They are very detailed and include, wills, marriage settlements, other trust documents, leases and mortgages and so form an invaluable resource for Irish genealogy. Almost all the memorials have been scanned by the Mormons who have now made them available free on FamilySearch.

The best place to start in searching the memorials is the Registry of Deeds Index Project. Volunteers at the project have been producing skeleton summaries of memorials of deeds and all people mentioned in them. These can be searched through the project's search form. You will then see their skeleton summary and find a link to the FamilySearch image of the original memorial (or sometimes to the start of the film that contains it.)

The Project's index is continually expanding, but still only covers a minority of memorials. The Project's Family Search Navigation Aids is your best route to finding other memorials. As the memorials were written, two indexes were prepared, one by grantor (testator, lessor, mortgagor etc) and one by townland (the lowest geographical unit in Ireland). Start by looking at the grantor index for the date using the project's guide to grantor index films. For example, this page in the grantor's index includes an entry for John Watson. It refers to volume 4, page 491, memorial 11914. You can then use the Project's tool to find the volume. You will have to guess which image might contain the relevant page. (Most films contain two volumes, so page 1 might be at the start or half way through.) The underlying memorial is here.

If you are looking for deeds covering a particular piece of land, then you can search on the townland index again using the Project's tool. The index is organised alphabetically by townland within county in groups of years. For each townland there is a list of deeds with grantor and grantee, volume, page and memorial number. Search for the memorial as above. You can find a database of townlands here and a topographical index of them l here.

The skeleton summaries use a lot of abbreviations, but these are well explained in the codes page on the web site. Most of the deeds themselves are fairly simple, but some institute complicated legal structures, usually devised by lawyers to avoid some aspect of the law as it then applied. These have been explained in papers by Dr Peter JF Coutts, although at the time of writing only the first two have been published. Coutts, P.J.F. (2020), “Understanding property transactions in Ireland, Part I: legislative and historical context”, The Irish Genealogist, Vol. 15 (3), pp. 387-412 and Coutts, P.J.F. (2021), “Understanding property transactions in Ireland. Part 2: Principal landlords and grantors- Carew, Bagenal and Warren”, The Irish genealogist, Vol. 15 (4), pp 604-629 both here. Parts 3-6 will be published in 2022, 2023, 2024 & 2025.

Cite memorials as: Register of memorials of Irish Deeds, Irish Property Registration Authority, Henrietta St, Dublin Volume [number] page [number] Memorial [number] [url] accessed [date accessed] [further information eg lease of x property from a to b dated c]

Court rolls

Until the creation of the Irish Registry of Deeds, Dublin in 1708, important land transactions could be made definitive by having them enrolled under the monarch’s seal by the Court of Chancery. The Court Rolls were mostly destroyed in the Four Courts fire of 1922, but abstracts were made by John Lodge (1692-1774). He had been appointed Deputy Clerk and Keeper of the Rolls, Dublin, in 1759 and his abstracts covering ‘all the involvements of lands, deeds and other matters of property … from the 3rd year of King Edward I ... to King George II’ are still available in the National Archives of Ireland. FamilySearch has them on microfilm and they are available on-line here. His records hold much the same interest as those in the Irish Registry of Deeds.

Volumes 1-10 are mostly chronological by monarch. There are no records available for the period of the Commonwealth. The last part of Volume 9 covers forfeiture of the lands of Jacobite supporters during the war of 1689-1691; Volumes 11, 12 and 13 deal with the disposal of land by the Crown under the Irish Acts of Settlement (1652 and 1662) and acquisition by the Crown under the Act of Attainder (1689). Volume 14 relates to markets and fairs.

Volume 15 contains a series of indices described on this contents page, and is the best place to start. The first (rather unclear) column shows the starting page for the first letter of an index by surname. The second column shows where to find indices of places organised by Abbies through to Counties and Cities, Glebes, Loughs, Manors, etc.

For example, on page 93 under ‘S’ across from the name ‘Strettell’ the number 438 appears in the column for Queen Anne. Queen Anne is in volume 9 at the start of the fifth reel. Opening this and navigating to page 438, you will see an abstract of an indented deed made 23 March 1705 in which Abell Strettell and John Barcroft acquired the townland of Bellatore (Ballitore), C. Kildare (a Quaker settlement) for £1,600.

Similarly, on page 101 under ‘W’, there are several entries across from the name ‘Watson’ including 414 also under Queen Anne. Page 414 of the relevant volume shows that James Duke of Ormond sold his interest in the townlands of Ardristan to John Watson of Kilconnor in March 1703.

Quaker surnames that occur or may occur in the rolls include Barcroft, Bewley, Carroll/O’Carroll, Clibborn, Cooper, Duckett, Edmonds(t)on, Fennell, Fisher, Forbes, Fuller, Garrett, Hewetson, Hutchinson, Jackson, Jacob, Lecky/Lackey, Neale, Newenham, Nicholson, Pike, Pim, Richardson, Ridgway, Sparrow, Strettell, Tottenham, Valentine, Wakefield, Watson and Webbe.

Cite as: Records of the Rolls : abstracts of all the involvements of lands, deeds and other matters of property remaining of record in the Rolls Office of the High Court of Chancery and in Bermingham Tower from the 3rd year of King Edward I ... to King George II [1274-1760] Lodge, JD, Dublin 1774 vol [volume no], page [page no] item [item no] ([URL] : date accessed [date]) [description of contents]

The volume on the Acts of Settlement is rather abbreviated and difficult to use. Luckily, the Irish Records Commission printed a cleaned up version of it as part of an appendix to their 15th annual report in 1825.

John Lodge's extracts from the court rolls are also now available on the Irish Virtual Record Treasury. The images there are better than those on FamilySearch and the whole has been indexed. You can search the images there here adding a key word in the box. This should make searching the court rolls much more accessible than before. You can also find the volume index on the record treasury here.

Some things to watch out for are a) that several other volumes of Lodge's work are included, so you may find other results, b) the quality of the indexing and the search function are not yet known and c) some volumes are indexed down to individual entries, but others are not, so the results may vary from one volume to another.

Land records

The FamilySearch wiki on Irish Land and Property is a good place to start.

  • Landed estates database. The NUI Galway maintains an Irish Landed Estates database with useful information on landed estates in Connacht, Munster, Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan, houses within them and families that owned them together with sources. Irish Quaker families mentioned in the database include Alexander, Barclay, Barrington, Carleton, Campion, Carroll, Clibborn, Cooper, Dennis, Duckett, Ellis, Fennell, Greer, Grubb, Jacob, Harvey, Hewson, Hoare, Newenham, Nicholson, Penn, Penrose, Pike, Pim, Riall, Robinson, Strangman, Watson, White, Wight and Wilson. (There are probably many more.)
  • Encumbered/Landed estates courts. By the start of the 19th century, many Irish estates were seriously 'encumbered' by wills, marriage settlements and mortgages which required the owner to pay fixed sums out of rental income. Entails sometimes also prevented the owner from selling. When the Great Famine left tenants unable to pay their rents, many estates were bankrupt; the Encumbered Estates Court was established with powers to sell the estates and resolve the bankruptcies. The court's sale particulars included the details of the estate, its owners, the encumbrances, the tenants and their rents. These particulars are now available on FindmyPast and FamilySearch and include details of 500,000 tenants on 8,000 estates. Some volumes of sale particulars are also available on Beyond 2022 - Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury, but these appear to be less complete. The sales were invariably also advertised in newspapers and summary sale particulars may be found in newspaper archives.
  • Between 1823 and 1837 a survey of Ireland was carried out to determine each landowner's obligation to pay tithes to the church of Ireland. The Tithe Applotment Books for what is now the Republic of Ireland are available free to search on the National Archives's Genealogy section. Those for the six counties of Northern Ireland are available through PRONI's e-catalogue, although the process for finding them is a little more complicated; from the main search page, click 'browse' at the top right, and from there enter FIN/5/A. When you click on the same PRONI reference, you will see links to digital images for all the parishes in Northern Ireland.
  • A survey of Ireland, the Griffith's survey was undertaken between 1848 and 1864 to determine liability to pay the poor rate. The survey covers the size and annual rental value of each property, its immediate occupier and the immediate lessor. It can be searched free here. The maps and plans used by the surveyors are available on FindmyPast. For more information on these and other historic maps of Ireland see Historical Maps and Gazetteers of Ireland.
  • Valuation Office books 1824-1856 for what is now the Republic of Ireland and much of what is now Northern Ireland are available free from the National Archives of Ireland here and those for Northern Ireland for the period 1864-1933 here.
  • Landowners in Ireland 1876 is a compilation by the Local Government Board of Ireland of data held by local poor law clerks of all owners of more than one acre of Land. The data is most conveniently available to search on Fáilte Romhat or on FindmyPast. It is also on Archive.org.
  • Irish Land Commission Records. The Irish Land Commission was established in 1881 to ensure fair rents for tenant farmers, and in 1885 its role was transformed to one of breaking up landowners' large estates and allowing tenants to purchase their farms. Between 1885 and 1920 it oversaw the transfer of about 13.5 million acres to 400,000 tenants and lent the tenants the money for their purchases. The records of these sales, which were divided between the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland and a dedicated archive at Portlaoise, have now been made available for the first time by FindmyPast. The sale details available include the names of the buyers and sellers, the townland and county involved, the acreage of the property and the valuation of both the land itself and any buildings on it. There is more information about the Commission, these records and other material in the Commission archives in this piece in History Ireland.

The Irish National Archives has a useful Guide to family & landed estate collections with links to estate records in its own and other collections.

Freespace page Irish estate papers links to the papers of many large Irish landowners, many of which contain documents on their land holdings such as deeds and rentals.

John Grenham's county by county listings have a section for 'Estate records' under each county with detailed listings of the landlords and some of the rent records availalbe. Unfortunately, most of the records that he lists are manuscripts only available to consult in the National Library of Ireland, but I think that he is overly pessimistic about how much is available on line, eg in 'Irish Estate Papers'.

Legal records

Irish court records are a disappointment. Records of cases about wills or land ownership can contain details of family structures and inheritance, but unfortunately very little survived the Four Courts fire of 1922.

The FamilySearch Wiki has a description of the court system and of what is available. Briefly, ecclesiastical, matrimonial and testamentary issues were handled by ecclesiastical courts (see Wills and Probate) and other issues by temporal courts. The four main temporal courts were those of the Chancery, the Exchequer , the King’s (or Queen’s) Bench and Common Pleas. Other specialised courts assembled at different times include the Courts of Claims (see Rebellion, plantation and war) and the Encumbered Estates Court (see Land Records above.)

In recent years, both Ancestry and FindmyPast have made the same two sets of data available, being Exchequer bill books Ancestry, FindmyPast and Chancery records Ancestry, FindmyPast. Both sets of records cover the period from the mid 17th to the mid/late 19th centuries and relate to legal disputes over land, commerce, trusts etc.

The records are, however, only lists of bills (arguments or statements of evidence) and cases. They mention the names of the plaintiffs and defendants and the dates, but have no information on the substance of the cases themselves. Sometimes this information alone can be useful, for example confirming the name of someone’s husband or wife or stating that one of the parties acts as executor of another's will or trustee of a marriage settlement; in other cases, you will not even be sure whether the names listed are for the people you are interested in, or you will be left wondering what the case was about.

Beyond 2022 - Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury has recently published three volumes of Repertories of Chancery Decrees and has placeholders for a further nine. These appear to be fairly complete summaries of the decisions of the Court of Chancery prepared by the Commissioners for Public Records in Ireland (1810 – 1830). However, it appears that these repertories were never published; the three volumes made available by the record treasury therefore publish them for the first time. They cover the years 1536-1624 (ref NAI RC 6/1), 1624 -1685 (NAI RC 6/2) and 1685-1732 (ref NAI RC 6/3). Search over all three volumes here adding an appropriate keyword. The index only goes down to the level of each volume, so if your search has positive result you will have to open the 'digital content' and use its search facility to find the page or pages that you are interested in.

If the case you are interested in is not covered above, one of these four approaches might help to clarify its contents

  • Court cases usually concerned wealth and most wealth was transferred in wills and tied up in land, so look for wills, deeds, entries in the court rolls or land records (eg in the encumbered estates court) for the people named.
  • As the Quakers disapproved of their members' going to court, they often offered to arbitrate in disputes and sometimes disowned members who took legal action, so look in the congregational records for about the dates concerned for the names of any Quakers involved.
  • If you are looking at a case later than about 1800 and in the unlikely event that it was thought legally significant, the case might have been covered in one of the law reports. For example, this search on Hathitrust, which you could amend, looks for Irish law and equity reports. You could amend it to include a name in the text as a key word. You also try searches on Google Books and Archive.org.
  • If the case was locally interesting, then from about 1800 onwards it might have been covered in the local press. Try the resources mentioned under 'Newspapers and Journals'.

Top

Newspapers and journals

Announcements of deaths and marriages started to appear in the Irish newspapers in about the 1750s and announcements of births started to follow some years later. They form an invaluable resource for genealogists for the period before civil registration.

It is often most effective to find births and marriages by searching on the father's name. You may have to try a variety of forms, with middle name, with middle initial, with place of residence, MacMullen, McMullen, M'Mullen etc. Also bear in mind that almost all the searches are based on unreliable OCR scans of the papers.

The FamilySearch wiki and John Grenham's website have useful introductions to the use of Irish newspapers in genealogy. The National Library of Ireland has a database of which newspapers were published where and when which may help guide your search.

  • The largest single database of Irish newspapers is in the British Newspaper Archive which is a joint venture between the British Library and the owner of FindmyPast. You can do a search for free but have to pay to see the underlying article. The same database is available on FindmyPast, although only in the most expensive subscription package, and the search function is not as good as on the BNA. The collection is continually expanding.
  • A subset of family notices from this collection can be searched for free on FamilySearch. A subset of the BNA collection can also be searched through the main search facility on FindmyPast. These subsets also appear to be growing.
  • Also requiring a fee are the Irish Newspaper Archives.
  • Apparently for many years the Irish Newspaper with the largest coverage was the Belfast Newsletter, birth death and marriage notices in which can be searched (with a subscription) on Ancestry which has images of the papers. Also available free on line is the Belfast Newsletter Index. Ancestry also has searchable text of the Freeman's Journal but only for the years 1763-1765.
  • Ancestry also has a large collection of Irish Newspapers, 1763-1890. These are not indexed or searchable, but (with a subscription) you can browse the images, selecting a title, year, month and day. (You could do a free search on the BNA and then find the image on Ancestry.)
  • The Irish Times has its own archive which also requires a fee.
  • The official organ of the UK Government is The Gazette first published in 1665. It has editions in London and Edinburgh. It also had a Dublin edition until 1922 and has had a Belfast edition since then. The London, Edinburgh and Belfast editions can be searched free at the link given. (Google also links directly to their contents). They contain announcements of many types including honours, military promotions, bankruptcies and administration of wills. Unfortunately the Dublin edition is not so easy to search. The volumes from 1750-1800 are available to browse on the Irish legislature library here where they are not searchable and on JSTOR here where some search is possible. FindmyPast has a searchable database of the same series. I have not managed to find the others.
  • Villanova Library has a selection of Irish Newspapers in its Joseph Garrity Collection. They are mainly nationalist in nature although there are also some more general titles such as the Irish Penny Magazine.
  • Waterford Libraries has digital copies of local newspapers available on its web site.
  • Nick Reddan (the person behind the registry of deeds project) has an excellent and free database of family newspaper announcements.
  • Similarly Old Ireland News has a selection of newspaper abstracts compiled by volunteers.
  • Also similar is Eddie's extracts which includes searchable news clippings, mainly from northern Ireland, covering the period 1800-1960.
  • Celebrated genealogist Rosemary ffolliot compiled a large collection of newspaper cuttings which is available on FindmyPast. They are particularly useful because they cover dates earlier than the series available on the British Newspaper archive. (FMP also has a set of Irish family announcements made in American Newspapers.)
  • Henry Farrar's Irish Marriages 1771-1812 an index to marriages published in Walker's Hibernian Magazine. It is available free here vol 1 and vol 2. It can also be searched on Ancestry and FindmyPast.
  • There is a large selection of newspaper cuttings from Kerry and North Cork in The Casey Collection, in particular Cork City Newspaper Abstracts, 1753-71, 1782-84, Births, Marriages, Deaths & Misc. from Cork & Kerry Newspapers, 1781-1821, Cork, Kerry & Limerick, Births, Deaths, Marriages & Misc. abstracted from Newspapers, 1749-1872, Cork Newspaper Abstracts, 1864-1922, Kerry Evening Post, Births, Marriages, Deaths, 1828-64.
  • Available on FindmyPast is The Tipperary Clans Archive. Badly named, this is a selection of 150,000 birth, marriage and death newspaper clippings mainly from Munster, originally collected by the Tipperary Clans Heritage Society and later preserved and digitised by the History of Family Project at Limerick University.
  • Dunboyne News Cuttings 1824-1878 (newspaper cuttings compiled by the Honourable Theobald Fitz-Walter Butler, Lord Dunboyne for a 19th century study of county Clare) are availalbe from Clare Library.

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Civil records

Births, marriages and deaths

Civil registration started in Ireland in 1845 for marriages of non-Catholics. Catholic marriages were added in 1864, as were births and deaths. A complete set of these records up until 1922 is held by the General Register Office in Dublin, which also has records for the Republic of Ireland since then. A copy of the records for the six counties of Northern Ireland is held by the register office there (GRONI) which also has NI records since 1922.

The GRO data is available, free, on the excellent web site IrishGenealogy.ie. Although the basic search function is on the index which can also be accessed elsewhere, the results take you to the actual registers of births, marriages and deaths, on which you can see the exact date concerned, the full names of the people involved, the parents of those born or married, the causes of deaths and so on. To preserve privacy, the GRO withholds images of births less than 100 years ago, marriages less than 75 years ago and deaths less than 50 years ago.

The equivalent search facility from GRONI requires payment, with purchased credits to search the index or a credit card to buy certificates. It is therefore always best to use the data held by the Irish Republic up until 1922.

The indexes for the Republic up to 1958 and Northern Ireland up to 1922 can be searched on FamilySearch.

Census records

Almost all Irish census records before 1901 have been destroyed and no census was taken in 1921. The fragments of earlier censuses that remain and the full censuses for 1901 and 1911 can be searched free on the web site of the Irish National Archives. They are also available free on FamilySearch and on pay sites Ancestry and FindmyPast.

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Directories and specific occupations

Directories

Irish directories started to be published from the mid 18th century. A large number of them are available on line, some listing private residents as well as professional and commercial enterprises, some covering the whole of Ireland and some dealing with specific locations. The largest sets of directories are to be found on pay sites FindmyPast, Ancestry and Roots Ireland, and free at Fáilte Romhat, FamilySearch, some public libraries (notably the Clare County Library, sites such as Cork Past and Present and depositories Google books and archive.org.

Rather than providing a detailed list, here are links to two places where such lists (with URL links) are available:

Library Ireland also has a good selection of local directories.

Dublin City Council has several searchable databases one of which is its Dublin Directory 1647-1706. This is a virtual directory constructed from different sources, namely Dublin City Cess Book, 1647-49, Dublin City Census, 1660-61, Dublin City Pipe Water Accounts and Principal Inhabitants of the City of Dublin, 1684. (The other databases, notably the electoral rolls are also useful.)

PRONI has a large set of street directories for Ulster (some only Belfast) covering the period 1818 to 1900.

The web site Ireland Genealogy Projects has a large variety of directories in its County Archives together with a plethora of other miscellany.

Web site SWilson.info has a good collection of directories, mostly indexed, together with a consolidated directory database.

See also Historical Maps and Gazetteers of Ireland.

Specific occupations

John Grenham's web site has an extremely useful facility to find reference works for a large number of different Irish occupations.

Some useful sources are:

  • The Dictionary of Irish Architects which also covers surveyors, civil engineers and related professions and often contains limited genealogical information and cites sources. Includes members of Quaker families Barcroft, Beale, Bell, Fayle, Hobson, Goodbody, Jackson, Neale, Newenham, Penrose, Rickman, Sparrow and Webb.
  • Alumni Dublinenses a register of the students, graduates, professors and provosts of Trinity college in the University of Dublin. The 1924 edition is available to search on FindmyPast and can be browsed on the TCD web site. As well as listing students with their dates of entry into the University, it also names their fathers and, in Latin, their occupations. (Translations of the Latin occupations here courtesy of the Ulster Historical Foundation.)
  • Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae has biographies of Church of Ireland clergy. The 1847 edition is available here for volume one (Munster), volume 2 (Leinster), volume 3 (Ulster), volume 4 (Connaught), volume 5 (addenda, illustrations and index) and volume 6 (supplement). (Ancestry also has a directory of Church of Ireland Clergy dated 1897.) Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury has a copy of a book of ecclesiastical appointments summarised by Sir William Betham (under archive ref COA IrMss/1). See also Irish local histories (Church Histories) and Church of Ireland Clergy.
  • King's Inn Admission Papers (1606-1867) are available free from the Irish Manuscripts Commission. They show law students and barristers at the start of their profession and often include their dates of birth and the names of their parents including their mothers' maiden names. Quaker families listed include, Barrington, Bewley, Carroll, Cooper, Duckett, Hancock, Greer, Lawton, Manliffe, Manly, Newsom, Nicholson, Pike, Pim, Watson. An earlier list of King's Inn members compiled by John Lodge is available on Ireland's Virtual Record treasury here.
  • Medical directories covering Ireland are available on both Ancestry and FindmyPast (FMP 1852, FMP 1858). FamilySearch has an index copy (ie without the images) of the 1858 directory available on FMP. Ancestry also has several related directories covering Ireland - medical students, dentists, nurses and physiotherapists and masseuses. Ancestry also has Irish Royal College of Physician Registers 1667-1920, Apothecary Records 1736-1920 and the Kirkpatrick Index of Physician Biographical Files, 1826-1952. See also 'History of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and of the Irish schools of medicine : including numerous biographical sketches, also a medical bibliography' by Charles Alexander Cameron.
  • Members of Irish Parliaments. John Lodge's Irish Parliamentary Register is available to browse or search on Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury under ref NAI Lodge/20. This contains the dates of the Irish Parliaments from 1559 to 1769 (when Lodge was writing), the number of members of each parliament and lists of members by constituency. The Record Treasury also has a list of members of the Irish Parliament at 1790 under archive ref CUL MS Add. 4346. For those with a subscription, Ancestry Ireland has History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 including biographies of 2,300 members of Parliament.
  • A Dictionary of Irish Artitists dating from 1913. Not as much genealogical information as the Dictionary of Irish Architects, but still a useful volume..

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Background geographical information

  • The Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland (1854, ten volumes) is a great resource with detailed geographic, demographic and other information about Ireland collated by the UK Parliament using results of the Irish Censuses of 1831 and 1841 and many other sources.
  • The Irish Manuscripts Commission has A topographical index of the townlands of Ireland as included in the Down Survey of 1656-8.
  • Townlands.ie is a database of counties, baronies, parishes and townlands electoral divisions in Ireland linked to maps on OpenStreetMap.

For more information on these topics and on historical maps of Ireland, see Historical Maps and Gazetteers of Ireland.

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16th and 17th centuries - plantation and war

The families of most Irish Quakers arrived in Ireland during the plantations of the 16th and more often the 17th centuries. This free space page Rebellion, plantation and war introduces sources on that period, with particular reference to Irish Quakers.

Other relevant sources can be found in Early modern Irish sources.

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Categories: Ireland Genealogy Resources