Tuesday 26 May 2015

Kilmurry Ibrickane RC baptisms for 1839 transcribed

County Clare Library has added another interesting set of transcribed baptism records, this time from Kilmurry Ibrickane parish register. The 219 records cover all of 1839 and were transcribed and donated by Marie Crowley of Derry working from LDS microfilm.

Each of the entries includes the child's name and date of baptism, the father's name and surname, the mother's name, and the name of sponsors. The mother's maiden surname and the parent's townland is also presented in all but a handful of cases.

In a separate Notes column are a number of instances where the baptism is recorded as 'conditional'. I've not come across this before, and I'm sure many others haven't either, so I asked a highly experienced genealogist for an explanation. He tells me this probably means the child had been already been baptised in something of a hurry, typically because the the infant was not expected to survive long; in these circumstances, the RC church allows (then and now) a baptism to be performed by anyone, not just a priest. So in these 1839 instances, the parish priest might subsequently have performed formal baptisms just in case (ie Conditionally) the first baptisms had not been carried out correctly.