Baptism and Marriage Registers for the Ballyoughter Area
The National Library of Ireland (NLI) holds a collection of Catholic parish registers for baptisms and marriages in microfilm format. The microfilming began in the 1950s and was completed over a period of about 20 years, with the permission of the Catholic hierarchy.
The records for Ballyoughter Parish list baptisms from 30 September 1810 to 27 December 1880 with a gap in the records between 1 January 1812 and 5 August 1815. Marriage records run from 20 August 1815 to 25 November 1880, with a gap between 10 February 1869 and 13 July 1871.
Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in Ireland in 1864, although non-Roman Catholic marriages had been registered from 1845. In the early years, civil records were not always kept consistently, which is why parish registers remain especially valuable for family-history research. For this reason, the National Library of Ireland applied a cut-off date of 1880 when microfilming Catholic parish registers.
The importance of the registers cannot be overstated as they are, in most instances, the only primary source of history for family research before the census of 1901 due to the loss of most earlier census data.
Please note that the NLI parish registers are viewed as digitised images of the original handwritten registers. They are not always easy to read, and spelling of names may vary. If searching for a family, it is useful to know an approximate year, the names of parents or spouses, and possible townland connections.
The Representative Church Body (RCB) Library is the official archive of record for Church of Ireland records that survived the fire in the Public Record Office in 1922.
A major initiative of the RCB’s Library is the Anglican Record Project, an ongoing RCB Library initiative to digitise surviving Church of Ireland parish registers, including records of baptism, marriage and burial. As of the latest available information, the Church of Ireland records for the Ballyoughter area are not available online but those records that are available may be viewed in person unless the document is too fragile.