The Northern Irish Ancestor

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There are two Irish regions, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland which is part of the  United Kingdom. Over the decades many Irish families, especially those from the northern region of the emerald isle, have resettled in England, Scotland or Wales.  So to help locate some additional vital records on any ancestors from the Northern Ireland region the online web site, Emerald Ancestor offers a free search to see what may be available.

The search box has you place a surname, a given name, if known and to select one of the counties (Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Monaghan and Tyrone). Then the listing of the number of marriage records, births, deaths, census and even any available school registrations are shown. Click on ‘view details’ to see if there are any matches. It will give a date of the event, the names involved, possibly an age and the county. To actually view any matches, this is where a subscription fee comes in.

Some examples of how many records might be found, the surname of Lennox in Londonderry would have 33 deaths listed, 79 births and 256 marriages.  Even some of the rarer surnames such as Kershaw, which is more found in England, had 17 marriages in 3 counties, 1 birth and 2 death records.

The vital records span many decades.  The birth records are from 1796 to 1924, the marriage registrations from 1823 to 1922 and death records from 1803 to 1900. The 1901 census for Fermanagh County is part of the database and census extracts in Northern Ireland from 1841 to 1851. The school registers are in Down County from 1892 to 1938.  Approximately 1 million Northern Irish names are in the databases.

For those with any Northern Irish ancestors, the Emerald Ancestor web site is place to investigate.