Update: List of Church of Ireland Parish Registers

By no means the only Church of Ireland resources, parish registers are nevertheless the collections which most obviously connect the Church of Ireland community to the worldwide diaspora. As previously reported, the Representative Church Body Library collaborated with the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) to produce the new resource.

The List accounts for all Church of Ireland parochial registers of baptism, marriage and burial – noting what survives, the dates covered, and where they are located. Where registers were destroyed in the burning of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI) during the Irish Civil War in 1922, it further records details about abstracts, transcripts and where they are held and crucially for the online materials, now features live links to those.

Thus it is a one stop search tool linking easily to online information which tells you where the Church of Ireland registers are, what survives and where it is available. The List was officially re–launched at a packed reception in St Audoen’s Parish Church in Dublin by the Director of the National Archives, John McDonough. He commended those in the Church of Ireland and IGRS “who had worked together to provide such an accessible and easy–to–use resource which will undoubtedly be useful for researchers”.

The new online version of the list interpolates all previous work into an accessible, colour–coded resource. Additionally, it now includes live links to other websites holding indexes, transcripts and scanned images of parish registers. Ultimately the list will further link to the RCB Library’s detailed in–house hand lists of the collections of parochial records – including the registers but also the wide variety of other records such as vestry minute books, preachers’ books, accounts and magazines.

The re–launched List of Church of Ireland Registers can be found at this link: <https://beta.ireland.anglican.org/news/6518/a-colourcoded-resource-of-what > 

For further details about the list, visit the RCB Library: https://beta.ireland.anglican.org/news/archive-of-the-month