A New Year’s gift: The Church of Ireland Registers of Strokestown (Bumlin) Parish, 1811-1969

The Representative Church Body (RCB) Library kicks off 2019 with a gift to family and local historians, especially those with an interest in the Longford/Roscommon region.

Annotation on the first page of the earliest Bumlin
combined register reveals its provenance thanks to the
purchase of a new registry book by the rector, the Revd
Edward Mahon, in 1811. RCB Library P737.1.1.
Click image to view this and other documents
in the January Archive of the Month

Its January Archive of the Month presents the transcribed content of the parish registers of the former union of Bumlin, Kiltrustan and Lissonuffy in Co. Roscommon, together with the memorial inscriptions on the monuments in the surrounding churchyard adjacent to the parish church of St John the Baptist, covering the period 1811-1969.

The parish of Bumlin centred on the landlord-planned town of Strokestown, where for over 300 years the Mahon (later Pakenham Mahon) family had their big house, which survives and today is the location of the Irish Famine Museum.

Work on the parish registers, which are located at the RCB Library (the Church of Ireland’s principal record repository), has again been carried out by local historian Alan Moran whose transcript of the Bumlin vestry minute book for the years 1811 to 1870 was featured in the Archive of the Month for May 2018.

Collectively this work means that Strokestown is one of the first Church of Ireland parishes to have all of its principal historic records transcribed and available online.

In accordance with best practice for online publication, the transcripts comprise baptisms and marriages 1811-1919, and burials and memorial inscriptions 1811-1969, and are fully indexed and searchable. The transcribed data is part of the Anglican Record Project, a long-running series of mainly Church of Ireland parish record transcriptions, initiated by Mark Williams and permanently available on the RCB Library website at www.ireland.anglican.org/about/rcb-library/anglican-record-project.

Alan worked under the tutelage of Mark Williams on the Bumlin registers and memorials inscriptions, and Mark’s input is specifically acknowledged. Their joint labour has made accessible for the first time a vast amount of ancestral and local history data that was hitherto relatively inaccessible.

The permissions of the Director of the National Archives, with whom the reproduction rights of parish registers reside on behalf of the state to 1871, as well as the Representative Church Body, are acknowledged by the Project.