The Belfast Newsletter is the world's oldest English-language daily newspaper still in circulation. This collection dates from 1738 to 1925 and contains over 200,000 pages. You'll find everything from local births, marriages and deaths, to international stories on the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
As well as being able to search by name, you can browse the editions by date to find out about the stories that mattered to your ancestors.
Another new collection to Ancestry is The Dublin Probate Record and Marriage Licence Index 1270-1858. This contains index entries extracted from wills, letters of administration, acts of probate, marriage licences and other records from the Diocese of Dublin.
Most of the entries list a name, place, occupation, year, record type and a page number for the original volume.
A series of 'updates' to Ancestry's existing Irish genealogy collections has also taken place. I can't tell you exactly what those updates consisted of, because Ancestry doesn't consider it worth telling us, but the enhanced collections are:
- County Cork 1851 Census Records, now 4016 records
- Census Abstracts 1841/1851, Northern Ireland, now 24,749 records
- Census Abstracts 1841/1851, Republic of Ireland, now 6,058 records
- County Antrim 1851 Census, now 28,780 records.