The Northern Irish Ancestor
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.
The subscription fee offers unlimited access to birth, marriage, death, and census records, along with a virtual library where many rare books related to Northern Ireland are online. Their fees range from one month membership at ($16 USD) £ 9.99 to 6 months for ($48.04 USD) £ 29.99 and one year available for ($80.07 USD) £ 49.99.
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.
< Return To Blog Are the name cotton be irish ?my willie 31/07/11
On your recent question about Cotton surname in Ireland - here is your answer: Cotton Surname An Anglo-Saxon name and also spelled Cottam, Coton, Cottom, Kottan, Cottane and Coatham (with many other various forms). From the Old English ‘cotum‘, it meant cottages. Most Cotton families originally lived in Yorkshire, Cheshire, Cambridgeshire, and Nottingham counties. In more recent times the Cotton surname is found in Midlands, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Shropshire Counties in the UK. It is also in Wales and spelled Coedton and Cwthen. Many Cotton families did move to Ireland from England, starting in the early 1600s. There was Wright Cotton who had land in the parish of Cloonfinlough, barony of Roscommon during the 1850s. In the 1901 Ireland Census there were 167 Cotton families in various locations of County Antrim, County Roscommon, County Dublin, County Cork and County Wexford to name a few. The number of Cotton family was 123 in the 1911 census of Ireland. More than half of the total numbers of Cotton immigrates to the United States came from Ireland between the 1850s and early 1900s. So the Cotton surname did start in England, but is also very much part of Ireland’s heritage.
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