|
|
Chapter TWO
THE GENERAL REGISTER OFFICE :
ACCESS
The natural place to begin a search for your ancestors is with the state registration of births, deaths and marriages and, theoretically at least, the system is straightforward. All births, deaths and marriages have been registered in Ireland since 1864, while non-Roman Catholic marriage registration began nineteen years earlier in 1845. The system is very similar to those used in England and Wales, and in Scotland, where registration began in 1838 and 1845 respectively.
In essence, the birth, death or marriage was (and is) recorded locally and periodically forwarded to a central collating body, the General Register Office (GRO), to make copies and indexes. The original registration was then returned to the local authority. The geographical areas used for registration were based on the old Poor Law Unions, which were also used as the basis for the nineteenth-century public health system. This is the reason the GRO in the Republic of Ireland is still administered by the Department of Health. The Northern Ireland GRO is now part of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. The GRO in Dublin has copies and master indexes for all of Ireland from 1845 to 1864 for non- Catholic marriages, from 1864 to 1922 for all births, marriages and deaths, and for the twenty-six counties from 1922. The Belfast office has copies and indexes of births and deaths for areas now in Northern Ireland from 1864. Northern Ireland marriage records from 1845 to 1922 are held in the District Registrar Offices. In both jurisdictions the GRO is the only part of the system officially open for public research.
Anyone looking at records more than sixty or seventy years old needs to be aware of the possibility of variant surname spellings. In Irish records variant spellings are a certainty. Before the twentieth century the 0 and Mc prefixes were treated by record keepers as entirely optional. McCarthy may appear as Carthy, Carty, Cartie; O'Brien will usually be Brien (or Brian, Bryan or Bryen). In addition, you should keep in mind that the vast majority of the population were illiterate or semi-literate, very often spoke Irish as their first language and invariably had more pressing concerns than the precise spelling of their surname. From the seventeenth century on Irish surnames were translated, pseudo-translated, transcribed phonetically and transposed to their nearest English equivalent. So Mac Gabhainn, from gabhann, meaning 'blacksmith', became Smith, Gowan or McGowan; Ó hEarrachtáin became Harrington; Mac an Dheanaigh, from dednach, meaning 'dean', became McAnany (or McEnany, McEneny or McAneany) phonetically, or Deane by translation, or even Bird because of a spurious resemblance to eán, the Irish for bird. These absurdities were mirrored by the Irish education system in the twentieth century, with its insistence that everyone had two surnames, the original Irish with an Ó or a Mac, and a lesser English version which was, naturally, the one in everyday use. Where surnames were awkward enough not to have an Irish original, one had to be made up. Even at the age of eight it seemed odd that my father and myself had different Irish surnames. Given this, it is not unusual for members of the same Irish family to appear in the same record with different surnames.
The registration system may be straightforward, but using it for research is anything but. In the Dublin GRO the research room is cramped and overcrowded, in summer especially, and the arrangements for viewing both the indexes and the extracts from the registers are so cumbersome that It can take several hours to carry out a simple piece of research that should take no more than a few minutes. The upshot, perhaps indeed the intended result, is
that experienced researchers will go out of their way to avoid having to use it. In Belfast the research arrangements are more sensible, but it is necessary to make an appointment a few weeks in advance. There are some workarounds which are outlined below.
As already noted, under the original system the local registrars forwarded their records to Dublin where they were copied and then returned to the local office. As well as the master indexes for the entire country, the General Register Offices also contain microfilms of all these copy registers. In Dublin the indexes are available to the public on the first floor of 8 Lombard Street at a fee of €1.90 per five years searched, or €15.24 for a general search. A general search consists of daylong (six hours) access to either the birth or death indexes, or six days of access to the marriage indexes. Only the indexes are open to the public; to obtain the full information contained in the original register entry it is necessary to purchase a printout from the microfilm at €1.90 per entry. These printouts are supplied for information only and have no legal standing. Full certificates, for use in obtaining passports or in testamentary transactions, cost €6.98.
In Belfast a general search of records assisted by members of the GRO staff for any period of years and any number of entries costs st£19 per hour, while an index search 'with limited verification of entries by staff' costs st£8 for six hours or part thereof. A full certificate costs st£9.
OTHER MEANS OF ACCESS
It is also possible to carry out research on some GRO records in other ways:
The registrar's offices around the country sometimes allow access, although this is at the discretion of the local officials. At times, particularly for surnames that are very common in a specific area, this can be the only way to reconstruct a whole family, since the research is on the original registers rather than indexes (see Chapter 9).
Some of the local heritage centres, including Clare, Derry, Mayo and Tipperary South, now have database transcripts of these local registers. Only commissioned research is possible.
Some transcripts of the records have been made available on the Internet. For example Waterford death records up to 1900 are now searchable online (see Chapter 8).
The Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, has microfilm copies of much of the GRO holdings as follows:
Indexes (births, marriages and deaths) 1845/1864 to 1958
Birth registers 1864 to March 1881 and 1900 to 1913
Marriage registers 1845 to 1870 -Death registers 1864 to 1870.
These records can be accessed via the family history centre attached to every Mormon temple.
The second edition of the British Isles Vital Records Index CD-ROM, produced by the Mormons, includes detailed abstracts from Irish birth records from 1864 to 1875 inclusive.
INFORMATION GIVEN
Whatever way you approach the records, the information they contain remains the same, and it is a good idea to know how they came into being. One of the peculiarities of registration is that, although the local registrars were responsible for the registers themselves, the legal obligation to register births, deaths and marriages actually rested with the public and was enforced with hefty fines. To avoid these, parents would sometimes amend a child's official birth date to ensure it fell within the required twenty-one days.
Births
From a research point of view only the following information is of interest:
Although it was not obligatory to register a first name for the child, the very small proportion for which no first names were supplied appear in the index as, for example 'Kelly (male)' or 'Murphy (female)'.
Birth entries can be difficult to identify correctly from the indexes without precise information about date and place. Even with such information the high concentrations of people of the same surname within certain localities can make it difficult to be sure that a particular birth registration is the relevant one.
A general word of warning about civil registration. A certain proportion of all three categories simply went unregistered. The thoroughness of local registration and the safety of the registers depended very much on local conditions and on the individuals responsible. Frustrated experience in cross-checking from other sources such as parish and census records suggests that as much as ten to fifteen per cent of marriages and births simply do not appear in the registers.
Marriages
Useful information includes:
Marriage entries are the most useful of the records, both because they provide fathers' names, thus giving a direct link to the preceding generation, and because they are the easiest to identify from the indexes.
Deaths
Information consists of:
Unlike death records in many other countries, Irish death records are not very useful for genealogical purposes; there was no obligation to record family information, and the 'age at death' is often very imprecise. This much said, these records can sometimes be of value. The 'person present at death' was often a family member and the relationship is sometimes specified in the register entry. Even the age recorded may be useful since it at least gives an idea of how old the person was thought to be by family or neighbours.
RESEARCH IN THE INDEXES
From 1864 to 1877 the indexes consist of a single yearly volume in each category -births, marriages and deaths -covering the entire country and recording all names in a straightforward alphabetical arrangement. The same system also applies to non-Catholic marriages registered from 1845. From 1878 the yearly volume is divided into four quarters, each quarter covering three months and indexed separately. So a search for a name in the 1877 births index means looking in one place in the index, while in the 1878 index you have to check four different places, each of the four quarters. From 1903, in the case of births only, the indexes once again cover the entire year and only they also supply the mother's maiden surname. Each index entry gives the surname, first name, registration district, volume and page number. The deaths indexes also give the reported age at death. The 'volume and page number' simply make the reference for the original register entry, which you will need in order to obtain the full information, either on microfilm or with a photocopy.
TIPS
Surname
The order followed in the indexes is strictly alphabetical, but it is absolutely necessary to keep possible variants of the surname in mind. The best advice is to list as many variants as possible before you begin. Otherwise you may find yourself having to re-order and search the same volumes more than once, a prospect to be avoided at all costs.
A large measure of scepticism is necessary with regard to dates of births, marriages and deaths reported by family members before 1900. This is especially true for births; the ages given in census returns, for example, are usually inaccurate, and appear to have been given in round figures such as fifty, sixty and seventy. These should be treated with particular caution. The true date of birth is usually well before the one reported, sometimes by as much as fifteen years. Strange as it may seem to us now, with our birthday parties and horoscopes, it would appear that very few people actually knew their precise date of birth. Perhaps they had more pressing things on their minds. Moreover since, after middle age at least, no one feels as old as they actually are, a guess usually produces an underestimate. Whatever the explanation, it is always wiser to search a range of the indexes before the reported date, rather than after.
First name
Among the vast majority of the population the range of first names in use in the nineteenth century was severely limited. The anglicisation of' the earlier Gaelic names was highly restrictive and unimaginative: John, Patrick, Michael, Mary and Bridget occur with almost unbelievable frequency in all parts of the country. Combined with the intensely local nature of surnames, reflecting the earlier tribal areas of the country, this can present serious difficulties when using the indexes. For example a single quarter of 1881, from January to March, might contain twenty or more Patrick (Mc)Carthy (or Carty) registrations, all in the same registration district of Co. Cork. A further obstacle is the fact that it is very rare for more than one first name to be registered. Thus someone known to the family as Patrick Joseph (Mc)Carthy will almost certainly appear in the index as simply Patrick. Of course you could examine all the original register entries, but unless some other piece of information such as the parents' names or the townland address can be used to cross-check, you will almost certainly not be able to identify which, if any, of the original register entries is the relevant one. The persistent imprecision regarding ages and dates of birth makes things even more complicated. Over the seven or eight year period when the relevant birth could have taken place, there might be fifty or sixty births of the same name in the one county. One way around this, if the precise district is known, is to examine the original registers themselves to build a picture of all the families in which the relevant name occurs. As already mentioned, the originals are still kept in the local registrars' offices.
Registration district
Because of the original arrangements for administering the system, registration districts were and still are largely identical with the old Poor Law Unions. Since these were based on natural catchment areas normally consisting of a large market town and its rural hinterland, rather than on the already existing administrative divisions of townland, parish and county, registration districts for births, marriages and deaths cut right across these earlier boundaries, a fact which can be very significant for research. Thus, for example, Waterford registration district centred in the town of Waterford also takes in a large part of rural south Co. Kilkenny. The only comprehensive guide as to which towns and townlands are contained in each registration district is to be found in a series of pamphlets produced in the nineteenth century by the Registrar-General's Office for the use of each local registrar. These are collected as Townlands in Poor-law Unions (ed. G. A. Handran, 1997, Higginson, Salem Ma.), copies of which can be found in the National Library (reference: Ir. 9141 b 35) or in the reading room of the National Archives. To go in the other direction, to find out what registration district a particular town or townland is in, the standard source is the Alphabetical Index to the Towns, Townlands and Parishes of Ireland. Three editions of this were published, based on the census returns for 1851, 1871 and 1901. In the first two the registration district is recorded as the Poor Law Union; in the 1901 Index it does not appear in the body of the work but is added in an appendix. Copies of these can be found on open access in the National Library, the National Archives, the General Register Office itself or in any library. If the original townland or address of the family being researched is known and the search narrowed to a single registration district, then at least some of the problems in picking out the relevant entry, in the births indexes particularly, can be significantly reduced.
RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
Births
You should approach the birth indexes with as much information as possible from other sources. If the birth took place between 1864 and 1880, the family was Catholic and the relevant area is known, you might be better off trying to identify a baptism from parish records first. In many cases, if you simply want the information rather than a certificate, the parish record itself will be enough.
If you know the area but not the date, the 1901 and 1911 census returns might give you at least an approximate age and year of birth. If you know the names of other members of the family and the order of their birth but not the area and date, you might have to search a wide range of years in the indexes, noting all births of the names which occur in the family, and then try to work out which births of the relevant names occur in the right order in the same registration district.
Marriages
As long as you are careful with surname variants and you know the names of both parties, research in the marriage indexes is straightforward. If two people married each other, then obviously the registration district, volume and page number references for them in the indexes have to be the same. You simply need to cross-check the two names in the indexes, working back from the approximate date of birth of the eldest child, if you know this, until you find two entries in which all three references correspond. The 1911 census records the number of years a couple have been married, obviously very useful in tracking the marriage entry.
Deaths
Again it is essential to uncover as much information as possible from other sources before starting a search of the death indexes.
If you know a date of birth from parish or other records, the 'age at death' given in the index along with the registration district provides at least a rough guide as to whether or not the death recorded is the relevant one.
If you know the location of a family farm, the approximate date of death can often be worked out from the changes in occupier recorded in the Valuation Books of the Land Valuation Office (see Chapter 5).
If the family had property, the Will Calendars of the National Archives after 1858 can be the easiest way to pinpoint the precise date of death.
Along with the names of the fathers of the parties marrying, the marriage register entries sometimes also specify that one or both of the fathers is deceased, which may at least provide an end point for any search for his death entry.
LIVING RELATIVES
It is very difficult to use the records of the General Register Office to trace the descendants, rather than the forebears of a particular family. The birth indexes after 1902 record the mother's maiden name as well as the name and surname of the child, so it may be possible to trace all the births of a particular family from that date forward. Uncovering the subsequent marriages of those children without knowing the names of their spouses is a much more difficult proposition, however.