Where do I research ancestors from County Down?
Start online with RootsIreland, where the Ulster Historical Foundation provides County Down's records: parish registers across ten denominations, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist and Quaker among them, civil records, and gravestone inscriptions for a long list of parishes. Down's strength is its census substitutes, because the 19th century censuses themselves are largely gone: wills, the muster rolls of about 1630, Protestant householders of 1740, flax growers of 1796 and an agricultural census from 1803 all survive in searchable form. For originals there are no county archives in Northern Ireland: the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast holds the church, school and local authority records, and GRONI holds the civil records from 1922.
Useful pages: The Irish surnames map · Trace your Irish roots · The 1926 Census guide · Coming home · Irish around the world · Plan your journey
Sources
- Irish Family History Foundation: RootsIreland and the county genealogy centres, rootsireland.ie
- Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the General Register Office of Northern Ireland, via nidirect: valuation revision books, church records and civil records
More in Surnames and your Irish roots
- Where does the Irish Escapes surname information come from?
- What does the surname map actually show: where a name lives now or where it was rooted in 1890?
- How do I find my surname, its Irish form, meaning and heartland counties?
- My surname is not among the 795 mapped names. What should I do next?
- Does an Irish surname mean I can claim a family coat of arms?