10 Free Resources for Irish Genealogy Online

The National Archives of Ireland has put together a section of their website that is chock full of free, digitized records for family and local history research. All collections have been indexed and searchable by name and location.

Records available include:

Census Records, 1901 and 1911
Census survivals, 1821–1851
Census Search Forms, 1841–1851
Tithe Applotment Books, 1823–1837
Soldiers’ Wills, 1914–1917
Diocesan & Prerogative Marriage Licence Bonds Indexes, 1623–1866
Catholic Qualification & Convert Rolls, 1700–1845
Valuation Office House, Field, Tenure & Quarto Books, 1824–1856
Shipping Agreements & Crew Lists, 1863–1921
Will Registers, 1858–1900
Calendars of Wills & Administrations, 1858–1922
Prerogative & Diocesan copies of some wills & indexes to others, 1596–1858

Information about each collection can be found in their Sources for Family & Local History section.

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is the official archive for Northern Ireland.

You can find the following titles In their online archives:

Freeholders' records
Londonderry Corporation records
Name Search
PRONI Historical Maps viewer
PRONI Web Archive
Street directories
Ulster Covenant
Valuation Revision Books
Will calendars

Note: Some of the items are transcripts only, while others have images attached that can be viewed and printed.

Maintained by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media, Irishgenealogy.ie is a website that gives users the opportunity to search a wide range of record sources in search of their Irish ancestry.

The website is home to the online Indexes of the Civil Registers (GRO) of Births, Marriages, Civil Partnerships and Deaths and to Church Records of Baptism, Marriage and Burial from a number of counties.

This site also offers simple, "ready-made" searches of the following websites and collections:

The 1901 census
The 1911 census
Indexes to Registers of Births Deaths and Marriages
Griffith's Valuation
The Tithe Applotment Books
The National Archives of Ireland Collection of Soldiers' Wills
The records of the Bureau of Military History
The online catalogue of the National Library of Ireland
The US immigration records of Ellisisland.org
The US immigration records of CastleGarden.org
The Ireland-Australia Transportation database
The records in the National Archives of Ireland collection "Women in 20th-century Ireland – 1922-1966: sources from the Department of the Taoiseach database"
The records of the Royal Irish Academy's Digital Humanities Observatory

Authored by writer and family historian Claire Santry, Irish Genealogy Toolkit is a friendly, easy-to-read, guide to Irish genealogy research.

Here are a few of the topics and historical themes you will find on the Irish Genealogy Toolkit:

Advice on how to start your research
Irish emigration to America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and beyond
Using historical Irish newspapers for genealogy research
Where to find court and prison records
How to find your ancestor's townland of origin
Census records
Free charts and forms
And much more!

Be sure to also check out Santry’s blog Irish Genealogy News for the latest developments in genealogy and record releases.

Church registers of marriages and baptisms are an extremely important source for family historians who are researching their Irish ancestors prior to the 1901 census. In some cases, these may be the only records of a person’s existence in Ireland.

As such, the National Library of Ireland offers an extensive collection of Catholic parish register microfilms. Contained in the registers are records of baptisms and marriages from the majority of Catholic parishes in Ireland and Northern Ireland up to 1880.

The site comes with a comprehensive Help section, which includes video instructions on how to locate a parish as well as how to view a register. The music is nice, too.

Genealogist Shane Wilson offers an amazing collection of free resources on his site SWilson.info.

Included in the collection are "digitized historic maps for Ireland and Dublin viewable in Google map format, a revised and improved townland database, scans and extracts from a number of directories, a database of Catholic and Church of Ireland parishes as they were during the mid 1830s, Catholic and civil parish links for over 1,000 parishes, and map coordinates to over to 2,000 churches and chapels etc. All free to access."

While his blog hasn’t been updated since March 2020, the historical information in his posts is detailed and very useful.

If you are looking for information about Irish ancestral homelands, you will want to visit Logainm.ie.

Developed by Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge (DCU) and The Placenames Branch of the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural, and the Gaeltach, the Placenames Database of Ireland provides the official Irish-language names of places in Ireland. The site is “a comprehensive management system for data, archival records and placenames research conducted by the State.”

Approximately 100,000 geocoded places, and 200,000 Irish and English place names, can be accessed via the website. The most common Irish language place names are explained in a glossary, and the distribution is displayed on maps.

About 23,000 audio recordings are available as a guide to pronunciation.

For information about place-names in Northern Ireland, be sure to check out Placenamesni.org.

Maintained by a charitable trust and a group of dedicated volunteers, GENUKI provides "a virtual reference library" of genealogical information relevant to the British Isles, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands.

A search box is located at the top of the homepage, and you can search by any term, such as surname or place name. Wildcards and Boolean terms can also be used. Results may be filtered by location and type.

Information about how to search, as well as an extensive FAQs section and guidance for first-time users can be found in the Quick Links.

John Grenham's Irish Ancestors website is deceptively simple at first glance. The homepage is simply a picture of what appears to be an abandoned building on a lovely spring day and a surname search box.

But don’t let the simplicity scare you away.

Irish Ancestors is actually quite comprehensive. According to the site’s description, it "aims to provide a single reference source for any records needed to research Irish Ancestors, as well as a starting-point for anyone with a surname historically found in Ireland."

Be sure to click the menu items at the top to find out what can be found in each section of the site. In particular, the Wizard is a fascinating tool that will ask the user a variety of questions about an Irish ancestor and produce a series of research recommendations and links.

To find out what’s new on the site, visit the companion blog John Grenham - Irish Roots.

Note: A subscription is required to access some parts of the site.

Always one of my favorite places to start any research project, the FamilySearch Wiki offers a huge collection of links to resources and tutorials for Irish genealogy research.

Click the blue Ireland Online Genealogy Records button for a list of online resources arranged by category. Free records available at FamilySearch are included in the list, but some links go to subscription sites like Ancestry and Findmypast; these are noted with the ($) symbol.

If you know where your ancestors lived, click the county map of Ireland for more information, or the textual county links below.

Be sure to check out the Research Tutorials for information on how to get started, where to find various records and more.

Note: some of the tutorials require a subscription to access.