I’m having great fun this afternoon searching through the newly available online index of the GRO’s civil registers of births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths on IrishGenealogy.ie, and finding a few things that I never quite managed to pin down on familysearch.org.
Search options are basic enough – first name, last name, district and year range, plus the option to restrict results to one or more of births, marriages and deaths.
There’s one gotcha I came across: if you select any of the options under Filter your results, you may need to clear them again before you can see the full results of your next search. I was bemused that no Murphys were showing up in my results, till I realised I’d clicked the checkbox for Births in the Search Criteria, but had a filter for Deaths in the Filter your results area.
Birth records include mother’s maiden name where available, which is a great help!
There’s also a lovely option to browse records by district, so you may happen upon likely relations you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
If you’ve hit any brick walls tracking down your Irish ancestors, it’s definitely worth giving this site a spin.
ETA: The fabulous Claire Santry has a very detailed post on the background to this new resource over on her blog.
