Civil Registrations in Ireland refers to the manner in which births, marriages, deaths and other key life events which allow the state to keep track of how many people are living in a country at one time came to be registered in Ireland from the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century records of this kind were kept by the dominant churches within a country, but as Europe became more secular and the separation of church and state intensified in the nineteenth century, the process of recording births, marriages, death and other key events was taken over the by state. It became known as civil registration. Non-Catholic marriages were recorded civilly in Ireland from 1845. However, civil registration is generally deemed to have started on the 1st of January 1864 when the British government in Ireland began requiring that all births and deaths were officially registered with the state, along with Catholic marriages. The records that have been produced since are vital for genealogical studies in Ireland.[1]
History of civil registrations in Ireland
Prior to the late eighteenth century, virtually every country in Europe did not keep records of the vital life events of its citizens. The recording of births, marriages and deaths was instead deemed to be the job of the church, as each of these events was accompanied by a Christian religious service, i.e. baptism, marriage and funerals. These records were systematically kept in parish registers in many countries.[2] It was only from the late eighteenth century that people in government circles began arguing that the state needed to start recording these events systematically for each person born within their jurisdiction. There were many different reasons for this. Firstly, Europe was becoming more secular and the number of atheists who were not baptized, married in a church or buried with Christian rites was increasing.[3]
Perhaps more significantly, the power of the state to monitor citizens in order to tax them more effectively and keep a record of whether they had committed crimes was expanding. This was largely a byproduct of the massive increase in population levels and the emergence of large cities and towns all over the continent as the Industrial and Medical Revolutions occurred. Before the local judge and magistrates had a fairly good idea of who the people in their town or village was in order to ensure they paid their taxes and didn’t commit crimes over and over again. With a changing society, a new system of recording who citizens were was needed. This would also help governments that were now trying to carry out national censuses and develop statistical records about excess deaths and public health issues. Hence was born the concept of civil registration. As with so much else in the first stirrings of modern Europe, secular, civil registration was first introduced on a mass scale by the revolutionaries in France. They did so in 1792, the same year they brought their first republic into being.[4]
In Ireland, civil registration was introduced belatedly and under somewhat unusual circumstances. It had already come into being in England and Wales on the 1st of July 1837. Yet the British government did not immediately extend the process to Ireland and the chaos of the Great Famine in the 1840s precluded introducing such a system at that time.[5] Instead the spur towards extending the concept of civil registration actually came from a concern that bigamy (where someone was married to more than one person) might be widespread in Ireland, with a person potentially getting married in a Church of Ireland ceremony and then marrying someone completely different under a Methodist, Roman Catholic or Presbyterian ceremony. Consequently, from the 1st of April 1845, all non-Catholic marriages had to be recorded with the government to ensure bigamy was not occurring. The Roman Catholic Church successfully resisted the government directive in 1845. Eventually it too relented and the system was expanded so that full civil registration began from the 1st of January 1864.[6]
Where to find Irish civil registrations records
Records concerning civil registration in Ireland are deposited with the Irish General Register Office and can be acquired through their offices in Dublin.[7] Many of these records have been digitized in recent years and the entire range of birth, marriage and death records from the inception of civil registration in 1864 down to the establishment of the Irish Free State in the early 1920s at the end of the Irish War of Independence are now available online, along with marriage records down to 1948 and death records down to 1973.[8] Some of these records, including over 50,000 death records for the first years of Irish civil registration, are available through MyHeritage.
What information can be found in Irish civil registrations records
The key elements of Irish civil registration records are records of when a person was born, when and if they married, and when they died. A lot of ancillary information about the person will be recorded on some of these civil registration records, though the detail changed over time. For instance, a birth cert will not just give the name of the individual and their date of birth. It will also typically contain details of where in Ireland they were born, the names of their parents and in some cases the names of the infant’s godparents, the date of their baptism and the home address of the family at the time of the birth. This is all very valuable genealogical information. Marriage and death records are also included in civil registration records for Ireland, as are some other events such as stillbirths and adoptions.[9]
See also
Explore more about civil registrations in Ireland
- Ireland Marriages, 1619-1898 records collection on MyHeritage
- The Three Cs of Irish Research: Civil Registration, Church Records, and Census at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching Your Irish Ancestors: Beyond the Basics at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Irish ancestors – Top 5 websites you need to know about at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- British and Irish research: The differences at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/birth-marriage-death-scotland-and-ireland/
- ↑ https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/the-parish-administration-and-records/
- ↑ https://humanists.uk/humanism/the-humanist-tradition/enlightenment/
- ↑ Paul-André Rosental, ‘Civil Status and Identification in Nineteenth-Century France: A Matter of State Control’, in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, 2012), chapter 5.
- ↑ https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/early-civil-registration/
- ↑ Claire Santry, ‘History of the Irish Civil Registration System’, in Family Tree Magazine (May/June, 2017).
- ↑ https://www.gov.ie/en/campaigns/af7893-general-register-office/
- ↑ https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/
- ↑ https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/irish-records-what-is-available/civil-records