FindMyPast has added another huge chunk of Dog Licence records to its Ireland and World collection. This latest upload of 3.6million individual records, sees the dog licence registers of 186 'new' courts added to the collection, as well as 'top-up' records from 40-odd courts already in the collection.See the list of 300-odd courts included so far.
The total number of online records in the Irish Dog Licence Registers collection now stands at just over 6million, and there's still more to come.
One of the courts making its first appearance in the collection is Cahir, in County Tipperary, where my maternal grandfather was brought up. This particular court's records span 1866 (when the Dog Licence was introduced) to 1913, and I can plot dog ownership by my granddad's family right across this period, starting with my gt gt gt grandfather, Patrick Tierney(one male yellow 'mongrel greyhound' and one male brown terrier), through his son, Philip Tierney (a number of sheep-dogs throughout the 1870s and early 1890s), to HIS son, another Patrick Tierney, who had two collies when my granddad was born in 1913.
Apart from adding a bit of colour to my family history, this information may also help me with my genealogical research because I've never been able to ascertain exactly when my gt gt gt grandfather died, nor, other than a complete guess of around 1815, when he was born. He appears in Griffith's Valuation (1851) and might have died at any point from then to the start of civil registration in 1864, or possibly for even a few decades after. With so many Patrick Tierney deaths recorded in the civil birth indexes for the relevant registration district, I'd have needed a lottery win to buy all those death certs and still might not have found him!
But the dog licence registers gives me a clue that Patrick may have died between his last licence application in 1869 and his son Philip's first licence application in 1871. Family Search shows there was just one likely Patrick Tierney death in that timeframe, so I'll stump up €4 for a research copy cert at the GRO Research Room on Monday and see if this record collection has delivered a bit more than some furry friends to my family research.
I'll be back.