Friday 1 March 2024

Ancestry updates and adds death records to its Ireland collection

The latest index to join Ancestry's Ireland collection is a small and neat one with just 5,618 individuals to search. It's been given the title 'Northern Ireland, Headstone Indexes, 1658-2018'. It additionally holds headstone details for 127 individuals buried in the USA.

The index links to sinton-family-trees.com, a family project site holding a range of ancestral information about the family – BMDs (civil and church registers), photos, school records, headstone transcriptions and miscellaneous details of their Quaker connections.

In the course of the researchers' visits to 33 burial grounds in Northern Ireland and 14 in the USA, many non-Sinton surnames were also recorded (fewer than 30% of the individuals in the source site's database are Sintons) so this collection may be worth searching by family historians researching other surnames.

UK and Ireland, Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current: The latest update of 710,497 obituaries tops up the entry count of this index to more than 30 million. Of this total, the number from Ireland remains fairly small; using Ireland as a search keyword, some 52,598 obituaries are returned with a small proportion related to the people with the surname Ireland.

Global, Find a Grave® Index for Burials at Sea and other Select Burial Locations, 1300s-Current: This Index has grown by 174,193 entries and now holds records of 15,823,357 individuals. A search with the keyword 'Ireland' returns more than 47,000 entries. While a small number have the surname Ireland, most of these entries appear to relate to people who were born and/or died in Ireland, but I'm not entirely convinced there is always a documented Irish connection.