Thursday 10 August 2023

Ancestry adds indexes to two online Irish burial record collections

Ancestry has added new indexes to two Irish burial register collections. Together, some 236,000 records have been indexed. These are not brand-new records making their debut online. They are indexes, created by Ancestry, to burial registers already online at two well-established, free to access, standalone websites: DiscoverEverAfter.com and EnfieldGraveyards.com.

While the indexes won't be free on Ancestry, their presence in such a major database will probably drive more researchers to the source material and enable more family historians to locate their deceased ancestors and extended family.

Ancestry has named the bigger of the two collections the Ireland Cemetery Collection 1865–2023. The index holds 225,711 entries to the burial registers held on DiscoverEverAfter.com after that team had carried out PlotBox surveys in a number of graveyards. The index does not include ALL the burial grounds included on the source website. Among those included in the Ancestry Index are Deansgrange and Shanganagh, both in Dublin, St Peter's RC cemetery in Drogheda, Co Louth, and several burial grounds in County Carlow. The records relate to burials between the years 1865 and 2023

The smaller collection – the Meath and Kildare, Ireland, Graveyard Collection, 1554-2014 – is an index of records transcribed from burial registers held on the Enfield & District Graveyards website at EnfieldGraveyards.com. There are 11,961 entries in the index from registers from Counties Meath and Kildare.