This year's St Patrick's Day delivery from FindMyPast.ie comprises three new 18th-century record sets and a significant expansion of the existing Directories collection. These additions to the Irish database tot up to fewer than 8,000 short of a cool one million records.
18th century census substitutes
The originals of this trio of record sets were lost in the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland. Fortunately for Irish family historians, antiquarian and professional genealogist Tenison Groves had spent the previous twenty-odd years transcribing many of the documents that went up in flames. The transcriptions are held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and have been digitised by other suppliers. Their arrival in the FindMyPast collection will help many researchers. In chronological order, the record sets are:
Ireland, Census of Protestant Householders 1740: The 15,957 individuals recorded in this listing are arranged by their parish and county. Geographical coverage includes the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal, Down and Tyrone and in some instances include the townland of residence. The purpose of the 'census' is not certain, but may have been connected with the Hearth Tax. See PRONI's article, here, for further background.
Ireland, 1766 Religious Census: These 20,505 transcriptions include returns from the six counties now in Northern Ireland and fifteen counties in the Republic of Ireland, and are arranged by parish. Geographical coverage is far from complete and the information collected is far from consistent; in some parishes, only a headcount was taken of each commuinity, while in others the names of the heads of household were noted. See PRONI's article, here, for further background.
Ireland, 1775 Dissenters' Petition: Presbyterian congregations across Ireland petitioned the Dublin parliament to repeal laws that restricted political, civic and professional postitions/occupations to communicant members of the Established Church of Ireland. Some members of the Established Church were also signatories. The petitions consist of dissenters' names categorized by parish, congregation, town, neighbourhood, or, in one case, barony. This small collection of 4,683 records includes parishes in Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Donegal, Down and Tyrone. For more details, see PRONI's article here.
Belfast & Ulster Directories
FindMyPast's existing collection of Belfast and Ulster Directories has been extended with the addition of three more titles and more than 951,000 names. It means that this collection now consists of 58 Belfast and/or Ulster directory titles spanning 1831 to 1900 and offer a total of 2,874,586 indexed name entries. (
View the full list of titles here.) Both transcriptions and original page images can be explored to locate your ancestors by name, residence, occupation, and year.
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Sample entries from the 1865 edition of The Belfast And Province Of Ulster Directory
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