Starting a family tree in Ireland: where to find the records

In a drawer lies a letter from Boston, dated 1911, in a careful hand. "Give my love to all at home in Ballyduff." No surname you recognise, but a place. In Ireland, that place is often the key. This article tells you where to look next, and what of it is free online.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home, and try to find the county, parish or townland your family came from. Then search irishgenealogy.ie, where the civil registers from 1864 (marriages from 1845) are free to view. The censuses of 1901, 1911 and 1926 are free on the website of the National Archives of Ireland. Before 1864, the Catholic parish registers of the National Library of Ireland take you further back.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often in the house: Mass cards and memorial cards, letters from relatives who emigrated, certificates, a prayer book with names on the flyleaf, photos with a note on the back. Ask the people who still remember. For each person, write down what you know for certain: full name, date and place of birth, marriage, death. And where you found it. In Irish research, one detail matters more than any other: the place. A townland or parish narrows thousands of Mary Murphys down to one.

Step 2: civil registration

Civil registration began for non-Catholic marriages on 1 April 1845, and for all births, deaths and marriages on 1 January 1864.

irishgenealogy.ie, run by the Irish government, shows the register entries themselves. It is free and needs no account. Citizens Information lists these years as available (checked September 2026):

Record	Online at irishgenealogy.ie
Births	1864 to 1924
Marriages	1845 to 1949
Deaths	1871 to 1974

For more recent records you go to the General Register Office (GRO). Its research room in Dublin takes search requests by email, as long as you have enough details to identify a specific entry. A specific search over up to five years costs 5 euro per event, and a copy of an entry costs 5 euro: the same information as a certificate, for research only. An official certificate costs 20 euro. Prices checked September 2026.

For Northern Ireland, the GRO in Dublin covers the whole island up to the end of 1921. From 1922, the records for the six counties are with GRONI, the General Register Office for Northern Ireland, which also holds the births and deaths registered there from 1864 and the marriages from 1845. On GRONI online you can search births over 100 years old, marriages over 75 and deaths over 50. You pay with credits of 50 pence: you buy at least one credit, the basic index costs nothing, and the full entry costs five credits (checked September 2026).

Step 3: the census, 1901, 1911 and 1926

The National Archives of Ireland has put the censuses of 1901 and 1911 online for free, for all 32 counties. You see each household on census night, with ages, occupations, religion, whether people could read and whether they spoke Irish. Since 18 April 2026, the 1926 census of the Irish Free State is also free and searchable, with more than 700,000 household returns.

Earlier censuses are almost all gone. The returns of 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after they were taken, and those of 1881 and 1891 were pulped during the First World War. Those of 1821 to 1851 were mostly lost in the fire at the Public Record Office in 1922. The fragments that survived are searchable online.

Step 4: before 1864, the church registers

Before civil registration, church registers are the only record of most baptisms, marriages and burials.

• Catholic: the original registers are still with the parishes, but the National Library of Ireland has microfilms of the registers of most Catholic parishes in Ireland and Northern Ireland, up to 1880. The scans are free online at registers.nli.ie. They are organised by parish, so knowing the place helps enormously.
• Church of Ireland: registers before 1870 are public records. Some had been deposited in the Public Record Office and were lost in 1922. The National Archives has microfilms of many pre-1870 registers; for later ones you go to the Representative Church Body Library in Dublin.
• Transcriptions: irishgenealogy.ie also has free transcriptions of Catholic and Church of Ireland registers from before 1900, for part of the country.

Free resources that go a long way

• Census search forms: from 1909, people claiming the new old age pension had to prove their age, and many asked for a search in the 1841 or 1851 census. Those forms, with parents' names and places, are free on genealogy.nationalarchives.ie.
• Tithe Applotment Books (from the 1820s and 1830s) and Griffith's Valuation (published 1847 to 1864) list the heads of household who held land or buildings. They are the best stand-in for the lost censuses. The Tithe Books are free on genealogy.nationalarchives.ie, Griffith's Valuation on askaboutireland.ie. A surname search there often shows you which townlands a family name was found in.
• The Genealogy Advisory Service of the National Archives in Dublin helps first-time researchers for free.

Other sources

• PRONI, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast, holds church registers, landed estate records, court records and wills. Online you can search the will calendars of Armagh, Belfast and Derry/Londonderry from 1858 to 1965, and the nearly half a million signatures of the Ulster Covenant of 28 September 1912.
• Emigration: during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, about a million people died and more than a million emigrated. If your family left, the records of the country they went to (passenger lists, naturalisation papers, gravestones, obituaries) can name the county or parish they came from. That place is what unlocks the Irish records.

A program for your tree

Gramps is free and open source. Like most family tree programs and websites, it reads and writes GEDCOM, the exchange format of family trees. If you have received or made such a file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows you, for free and without an account, how many generations it contains, who the oldest ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A register tells you who was baptised in which parish, not what the kitchen smelled like on a Sunday. That lives in the photos, in the stories, in the letters that crossed the ocean. In The Memory Palace, the family tree comes in as GEDCOM and every generation gets a place beside its photos and stories, so the names become people again.