Extensive church records for Co. Armagh are in the pipe

Armagh Ancestry, the Irish Family History Foundation's designated research centre for genealogical research in County Armagh, has reached an important milestone in a two-year project to upload another significant chunk of church records to its sizeable database on RootsIreland.ie.

The records have been transcribed from  the following sources:

• Church of Ireland (CofI) baptism, marriage and burial registers,
• Presbyterian baptism and marriage registers,
• Quaker marriage and burial registers, and
• Methodist baptism registers.

In some instances, the additional transcripts 'top-up' a specific parish's collection. For example, the records already searchable on the database for Milltown CofI collection currently consists of marriages from 1845 to 1921; the new tranche of records will include baptism 1840-1864, burials 1845 to 1889, and slightly earlier marriages from 1840-1845. In other cases, records are about to be uploaded for parishes that were not previously represented in the database (for example, baptism records for the Bannfoot Methodist congregation and Montiaghs CofI).

The project team has recently imputted these records but they have yet to be fully validated. The validation process will take some time to complete, and only then will they all be available to search at RootsIreland.ie.

You can see a full breakdown of Armagh Ancestry's existing collection at RootsIreland here.

A summary of the soon-to-be validated additions can be found here.

If you think one of your ancestors may be discovered among these records and you just can't wait for the online database to be updated, you can ask Armagh Ancestry to make a manual search. You'll need to name your ancestor and pay a £10 fee for the service. Contact Armagh.Ancestry@armaghbanbridgecraigavon.gov.uk.