Research in Ireland Part 1: Roman Catholic Parish Records

 If you have Irish immigrants in your ancestry and have attempted to trace them back to Ireland, you already know the challenges of this quest. Many Americans who have Irish lines only know that someone came from Ireland at some time. Others are more fortunate to have found family records, immigration records or vital records that offer some clues as to where their ancestors lived in Ireland and when they might have emigrated. But for the majority of us who descend from poor Irish men and women who spent much of their lives struggling as new immigrants, we find they left few records. On the US census, often an ancestor’s record shows only the country of origin as Ireland, and we yearn for at least the name of the county.

         Landing at Ellis Island, Illus. in: Quarantine sketches. The Maltine Company, [1902, p. 25],  LC-USZ62-12595, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 

Before we dive in to a tool to help us identify the areas of Ireland where our ancestors may have lived, it is imperative to understand how the country is organized.

File:Ireland map modern.png. (2020, September 13). Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. Retrieved 20:40, August 30, 2021 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ireland_map_modern.png&oldid=457463988

While we have states and counties in America that form our basic municipal organization, Ireland has several more divisions besides the county level, both civil and religious. Wesley Johnston explains the province/county divisions  very clearly and provides excellent maps.

After the county level, the next division is the Roman Catholic diocese. In Ireland, the organization of the dioceses precede the partition, so some are only in the North or in the Republic while others span both areas.

Within the diocese is the parish, and there are two types: civil and  ecclesiastical,  the latter  of which is subdivided into Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland (Protestant.)

Two other divisions, the Barony  and the Poor Law Union  will not be part of this post but can be very helpful to researchers.

We now turn our attention to a record collection that may be of help in your search, no matter where you are in your knowledge of the location of your ancestors in Ireland. This record set is the “Ireland Roman Catholic Parish Records”  at the National Library of Ireland (NLI.) 

[National Library of Ireland]. 1930-1950

You can view the records at this site, but they are not transcribed and can be difficult to read.  Fortunately, the genealogy program Findmypast 

used by permission of Findmypast

 has transcribed many of the records and makes them searchable free of charge (you do need to set up an account.) Here is the page to browse the Parish records:

You are also able to search by surname in each of the three types of records: baptism, marriage and death. Later in the post, I will demonstrate a search of the baptismal records.

The company describes the full collection as:

“ …over 10 million Catholic family records …Original church registers of baptisms, marriages, burials, communions, confirmations and more will reveal some of the most important details in your family's history. Every county and over 1,000 parishes in Ireland are covered.”

Before we do a search of the Parish Records to give you a taste of the process, here’s a tip: if you are new to Findmypast or want a refresher on how to search the records, I suggest you watch Jen Baldwin’s youtube video. 

I decided to begin my Parish Record search in Findmypast with my paternal great grandfather’s surname of Carney.  I have included screen shots (by permission of Findmpast) from the program to guide you through my search process.

When you sign in to Findmypast, this page appears:

As seen above, I chose the "Quick Links" section to search. Under that heading, I narrowed my search to "Parish Records" which brought me to this page:

As you can see above, I started from the left and narrowed my records search to "Parish Baptisms." Then under Who, I typed "Carney" as my name search. Under Where there is a pull-down menu, and I selected "Ireland." And I received 4,423 results! I needed to narrow my search parameters.

The program allows you drill down further into the location you want to search. I discussed my counties of interest in Ireland in an earlier post. I would narrow my Ireland search to Tyrone County. When I typed "Tyrone," the words "Northern Ireland" were added by the program.

 See my changes on the page below:

If you look at the third box under Where, you find the mileage register.  I moved it to 20 which means 20 miles out from the center of the county. 

These new parameters brought the total results from 4,423 to 28, a workable number. I wanted to find out when the earliest baptism was. On the blue bar above the results, I clicked on the Year column heading. This sorts the data  chronologically from the earliest date; in this case, from 1779-1880. 

As I looked at the 28 Carney baptisms, I focused on the Location column heading. I noticed that 17 (61%) were in the diocese of Clogher. This kind of cluster bears more scrutiny. Looking more closely at the Clogher parishes where Carneys were baptized, I noticed that Carolus Carney's family were in Aughalurcher Parish. Again, this name was familiar. In another record group, the Catholic Qualification Rolls, (I will write another post on this source) I found a Denis McElroy, one of the Carney cohort families described in my post of August 18, 2013, living in Aughalurcher Parish also. And even more exciting is that both Carolus and Denis were from the same small village of Maguiresbridge! Another interesting link among the Carney baptism locations is that 9 out of the 28 were from Enniskillen , 8 miles from Maguiresbridge.

In conclusion, my goals in this post were to introduce the Ireland Roman Catholic Parish Records and to show how to search them with Findmypast. I also wanted to show how a researcher can put the findings from different sources together to come up with new connections.

Irish on the Move

 Hello to all my readers! I wanted to wish you health, safety and well-being during these times of the pandemic and economic disruption. I have not been writing on my blog during the last year (July 2019 – August 2020) but I have been working on my Carney/Kearney and Duffy lines, trying to locate where they may have lived in Ireland. From this research, I have discovered several sources and information that may be helpful to others on this journey.

As preparation for my research into possible ancestral home places in Ireland, I studied the map of Ireland and started reading Irish history.

Ireland_map.gif, Created by George McFinnigan, 26 February 2006, Wikimedia.

I realized that I didn’t know anything about the movement of people within Ireland over the years. This knowledge would be critical in my quest to trace my lines in the country.

In my experience, when American scholars write about Irish history, they focus on their coming here and especially concentrate on the Great famine of 1845-1849. And this is to be expected as the American public wants to know about this time period because, according to the Library of Congress:

 “Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish constituted over one third of all immigrants to the United States. In the 1840s, they comprised nearly half of all immigrants to this nation.”¹ 

On board an emigrant ship - the breakfast bell immigrants on ship deck, 
1884, LC-USZ62-60319 (b&w film copy neg.) 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.

Also, humans are ethnocentric and naturally like to tell their stories from their point of view as this cover of Harper’s magazine shows: the people of Ireland are beseeching America for help:

Nast, Thomas, Artist. The Herald of relief from America / 

Th. Nast. Ireland, 1880. Photograph

With this said, when you want to find where in Ireland your ancestors came from, you need another focus. You want to learn about movement of people within Ireland rather than from Ireland. In other words, you are looking for internal migration. A basic question comes to mind: What factors caused people in Ireland to move to different parts of the country? The answer is the same for all humans throughout history. People move to gain better access to food and/or to escape war and violence.

A key contributing factor to the difficulty the Irish peasant faced in growing sufficient food over several centuries was the practice of various English monarchs (before them the Anglo-Saxons) of  making large land grants in Ireland, called plantations, to favored followers. 

Wikimedia Commons contributors, "File:Flight of the Earls.jpg," 

Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository,  
title=File:Flight_of_the_Earls.jpg&oldid=444543400

 (accessed September 19, 2020).

In some cases, the government sought a policy of replacement/displacement where English farmers were brought in (or “planted”)  to help in “Making Ireland British.” These newcomers pushed out the native Irish who often had to move to less fertile, more boggy land. In other cases and other times, the landowners remained in England and hired landlords in Ireland and overseers to supervise their Irish tenants. These middlemen, driven by a desire for high profits, would regularly raise the rent so that poorer tenants were displaced by those with more ability to pay.

Thus we see the causes of internal migration in Ireland, and we can find eye-witness accounts to this movement in the travelogues of Arthur Young who toured Ireland from 1776 to 1779. 

Portrait of Arthur Young (1741-1820) British economist 

and man of letters, by John Russell, 1794, 

National Portrait Gallery, Wikimedia.org

Young was interested in how people lived in the countryside, how they made a living from the land. He noticed that the Irish tenant farmer had no qualms about how much his labor was worth and would “vote with his feet” when he believed that his landlord was not paying a proper or market rate:

“Whole families in that country will move from one place to another with freedom, fixing according to the demand for their labour, and the encouragement they receive to settle.”2   

Now that we have outlined the reasons for the internal migration in Ireland, we need to understand some patterns or geographic directions of this movement in order for this information to help us see how our ancestors may have moved through the country at different times over centuries. I turned to a seminal work on Irish migration by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007. 

Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007 by Patrick Fitzgerald,

goodreads.com, spring.com, google images

Fitzgerald divides the period from 1607 to 2007 into fifty year chunks and for each he discusses what happened in each of the three types of migration: immigration, internal migration and emigration.

For our purposes, we need just an idea of the general direction of movement within the country or internal migration. One of the fundamental patterns of internal migration is most countries, including Ireland, since the Industrial Revolution is people moving from rural areas to larger towns and cities. From the early 1800s onward tenant farmers saw new opportunities in factories and in the service sectors that grew up to meet the needs of the more prosperous urban inhabitants.

Underwood & Underwood, P. (1903) Modern Looms for fine texture hosiery
 in a factory at Balbriggan, Ireland. Ireland, 1903. [Photograph]
 Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020681993/.

 An important note for genealogists about this pull of the city is that country migrants would mostly travel to the nearest town or city and would usually remain in the same county. (end note: Fitzgerald p. 138 and 155.) How will this knowledge affect my research in Ireland? To start with, let’s see what I have accomplished so far.

Before I began thinking about the movement of people within Ireland, I was concentrating all my efforts in Ulster and adjoinng counties for reasons that I discussed in  my post of August 13, 2018, I noted how I used Dr. Tyrone Bowes’ surname distribution map, Griffith’sValuation and the 1911 Irish Census to place Carney and cohort families in the Irish counties of Leitrim  and Fermanagh. I was now ready to look more widely at Irish counties.

I was scouring the internet for Irish genealogical sources during the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic, when I came across the National Archives of Ireland (NAI.)

CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23958509) 

  Because the building was closed to the public due to the virus, the Archives was offering a special opportunity:  researchers could send them an inquiry for free (as of my checking on the site on September 11, 2020, the Archives is now open on a limited basis.) I was so excited. This was a chance to canvas all the counties of Ireland. I submitted a list of individuals that had immigrated from Ireland and ended up in Chicago by the mid-1800s who were associated with my great, great grandparents, John Carney/Kearney and Mary Duffy.

Some weeks later, I was excited to hear back from the NAI with this information:

Civil marriage record from www.rootsireland.ie , found by NAI, April 2020.

This one record contains so much new information. In addition to identifying a couple of the same names and similar ages to my great great grandparents, the record presents a whole new county to research -- Sligo. I will take up the analysis of this new information in my next post. 

Map of the Baronies of Ireland in 1846. 
Source data: Ordnance Survey of Ireland: Baronies 2011 
(OSI), author: XrysD, 21 July 2018.

As tantalizing as it is to think this couple from Sligo are my ancestors, as every genealogist knows, this could be just a coincidence. In the response to my inquiry, NAI staffer suggested that:

 “We should not jump to conclusions that this is definitely your ancestors but rather should seek to prove or disprove this record.”

A second suggestion from the NAI was to look at US records. Oh, how hard I have tried to find some! I will discuss what US sources I have rigorously studied over the past twenty years in my next post as well.

In conclusion, Americans who study their Irish roots often encounter source material focused on the Great Famine of 1845-1849 and its effect on immigration to America. But if you wish to investigate where your Irish ancestors came from in the centuries before and up to the Famine, you need to focus on internal migration in Ireland over the centuries.

¹https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/irish/irish-catholic-immigration-to-america/#:~:text=Between%201820%20and%201860%2C%20the,all%20immigrants%20to%20this%20nation.

²Young, Arthur, 1741-1820, John Parker Anderson, and Arthur Wollaston Hutton. Arthur Young's Tour In Ireland (1776-1779). London: G. Bell & Sons, 1892. Vol. 2, p. 119.

 

Immigration to America

Immigration is a world-wide issue today, but it is not new. Throughout human history, people have been migrating to other places. This movement of people has always fascinated me. One particular migration of people has been of most interest to me, and that is across the Atlantic to America that began long before 1776 when this country was founded. As a descendant of a passenger on the Mayflower on the paternal side and the granddaughter of a Czechoslovakian-born naturalized citizen on the maternal side, I am the proud and appreciative product of immigration. And I am not alone. Most Americans today are descendants of immigrants who withstood brutal conditions as they crossed the Atlantic.

On board an emigrant ship - 

the breakfast bell immigrants on ship deck, 

1884, Library of Congress Prints and 

Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 

USA, LC-USZ62-60319

I believe America owes much to the millions of immigrants who have come to this country. They have given their raw labor to build the infrastructure that is the foundation of our nation: the canals, the railroads, the roads. Although the jobs available to new arrivals have changed through the decades and the centuries, the contributions of immigrants have always been essential to the strength of America. Let’s take a look at what conditions cause immigration. Why did Europeans, starting in the 1600s, emigrate to the Americas? 

From reading Marcus L. Hansen’s book The Atlantic Migration  and from ideas formed over years of reading about immigration to America, I have reached several conclusions. The reasons for emigration were mainly economic (worsened by population growth), but people also left their birth countries seeking to avoid religious persecution and forced conscription. I discussed the “push” and “pull” factors that influence the movement of people in my post of April 19,2014.

“Descriptive portraiture of Europe in storm and calm….,”  

Edward King, 1886, C.A. Nichols, 

Springfield, MA, https://www.flickr.com/photos/

internetarchivebookimages/14595849259/ 

The economic push factors first centered around agriculture. For much of the time that humans have been on this earth, raising crops has been the main way of survival. And anyone who has tried to grow a garden can attest to the effect weather has on the harvest. For thousands of years, people have been at the mercy of the elements as they try to grow enough food to pay the landlord and feed their own families. Droughts, floods, insect infestations, worn-out soil and other natural events have brought devastation and starvation and driven people to seek new land.

It was not until the 18^th century with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in England that the majority of the population would become less dependent on farming for their livelihood. The Industrial Revolution caused a shift in the economic paths people took to sustain their families. Although agriculture remained paramount to the sustenance of most people, small cottagers benefited from advances in transportation to increase markets for their hand crafts (spinning, weaving, knitting) to supplement what they could raise on their small parcels of land.

Irish spinner and spinning wheel.
County Galway, Ireland,
between 1890 and 1900,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, 

Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Mechanization slowly developed and factories began pulling people from their homes.

Walton, Perry, The Story of Textiles, 1912,
 J.S. Lawrence, Boston, MA, p. 166-A

The movement of poor peasants to factory work did not relieve their poverty (due to low wages) and overcrowding in urban areas led to the spread of disease. The health and life expectancy of the new factory workers suffered from conditions brought about by mechanization, including exposure in enclosed spaces to air full of toxins from textile production and injuries from machines. As we have seen, poor economic conditions played a big part in the urge for people to look for opportunities somewhere else. 

From the early 1600s through the early 1900s, the “New World” (as it seemed to the Europeans) functioned as a safety valve for people from Europe who were fleeing the situations caused by the events mentioned above. Other things also “pushed” people to leave their birth countries. These include the intermittent warring between European countries that made daily living for people precarious: food shortages, more taxes to pay for military activity, and forced conscription were factors that encouraged emigration.

“Descriptive portraiture of Europe
in storm and calm….,”
  Edward King, 1886, C.A. Nichols,
Springfield, MA, https://www.flickr.com/photos/
internetarchivebookimages/14595830779/

The lack of religious freedom was one other push factor that led people to leave Europe and sail across the Atlantic to America. 

This discussion of push and pull factors leads us to ponder how emigration affects both the sending (home) country and the receiving  (destination) country. The effects of immigration (economic, cultural, social) on America is right now and historically has been the cause of heated debate and sometimes violent protests all the way back to colonial times. In a post from July 9, 2014, I discussed the anti-immigrant movement symbolized by the Know Nothing Party  which was born and became popular at a time of high immigration of poor, unskilled Catholics from Ireland.

 How American-born or even many naturalized citizens feel about new immigrants often stems from fear of the outsider: will our language/culture be lost, will our society be taken over by foreigners, will our jobs be lost?  What never seems to enter the equation are two factors. First, history has shown that the children of immigrants nearly always embrace this country with its language, culture and government as their own. Second, the immigrant generation provides labor for jobs that many native Americans do not want.

Know-nothingism in Brooklyn, 1881, Illus. in: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper,

 vol. 51 (1881 Jan. 15), p. 340, 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs 

Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

America has been eager to accept immigrant labor for more than three centuries, but many Americans have not been as willing to welcome them into the fabric of our society. Joseph Connor wrote an excellent article in "American History Magazine,"¹ chronicling American sentiment toward immigrants since our nation began. Connor shows that the American people’s vacillating  relationship with immigration often coincides with economic shifts in the economy. This view is corroborated by Eytan Meyers in his study² of immigration policy, where he states that laws restricting immigration were passed during the recession of 1882-1885 and again during the depression of 1891-1897.

Politicians and others have long tried to understand and sway public opinion. And one of the best ways to grab the public’s attention is through images. With the advent of newspapers and magazines, would-be movers and shapers of popular belief found a successful tool in the art of political cartooning. The political cartoon also functions on the back end to capture the prevailing mood of the citizenry, actually responding to the public’s attitude to many things, including immigration, at different points in our history.

Joseph Connor included two political cartoons in his piece that clearly show how public opinion on immigration parallels economic downturns. One can ask several questions of these cartoons. Do they convey just the opinions of the artist? Does the artist attempt to capture the widespread feelings/fears/beliefs of the day? Is the artist conveying the opinions of one political party or another? Is the artist simply portraying the feeling of the publication paid for his/her work?

The title of the first cartoon, “Columbia's Unwelcome Guests” gives us a big clue as to the sentiment behind the drawing. Frank Beard was the illustrator, and the cartoon was published in 1885 by Judge Magazine at the tail end of a four year recession. In the drawing, Mr. Beard depicts multitudes of immigrants from the sewers of Germany, Russia, and Italy pouring across the Atlantic and breaching our shores. As you can see from the labels he places on the newcomers, (Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Dynamiters) Beard shows them threatening the law and order of America.

'Columbia's Unwelcome Guests.' American cartoon by Frank Beard, 

1885, showing unrestricted U.S. immigration policies

 encouraging the arrival of anarchists, socialists, 

and the Mafia from the sewers of Italy, Russia, 

and Germany; used by permission under  2019 

The Granger Collection LTD d/b/a Granger Academic.

The title of the second cartoon, “Where the Blame Lies” by Grant T. Hamilton is a not-so-subtle condemnation of immigrants also. It was published in 1891, (the beginning of a seven-year depression) in Judge Magazine. Hamilton goes a bit further in his name-calling as he links political movements, crime and poverty to certain nationalities: German Socialist, Russian Anarchist, Italian Vagabond, English Convict, and Irish Pauper. Perhaps the saddest part of the cartoon is the Statue of Liberty is pictured in the background.

Hamilton, Grant E., Artist. Where the blame lies / Hamilton. 

Castle Clinton New York United States, 1891. 

New York: Sackett & Wilhelms Litho. Co., 

April 4. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97515495/.

In conclusion, humans have been on the move for centuries. Many reasons spur this movement, and we have mentioned some of the major ones in this post in our discussion of immigration to this country. Throughout its history, America has been the beneficiary of the labor and the many other contributions that newcomers bring. Let us never forget this.