Hi Lep,
I have been told by someone who is in Ireland that a lot of the census are still there the fire which was next to the records office didn't destroy the records at all. I get so many different stories on this, who do you believe??
Sorry I don't know what N.L.I. is and the Latter Day Saints I am told have a lot of Irish records which you can order.
On Genes Reunited they say this about Irish records and this is the guy who did all the research for Who Do You Think You Are recently on television.
The records were all destroyed in 1922
No, they weren't. The Public Record Office in Dublin was indeed destroyed during the Irish Civil War in 1922, along with virtually all its holdings. From the point of view of genealogy, the most significant losses were the 19th-century census returns, the Church of Ireland parish registers and the testamentary collections. Anything not in the PRO has survived, including non-Church of Ireland parish records, civil records of births, marriages and deaths, property records and later censuses. For much of the material that was lost, there are abstracts, transcripts and fragments of the originals.
Irish research is impossibly difficult
To the contrary, there is actually quite a compact set of relevant records, almost all held centrally in Dublin or Belfast. If you start with enough information - in particular, a place of origin in Ireland - research is actually very straightforward.
All the records for Northern Ireland are held in Belfast and those for the Republic of Ireland are in Dublin
Wrong again. Until 1922 the entire island was one administrative unit. Both Dublin and Belfast repositories have at least copies of the pre-1922 records, with those in Belfast largely, but not completely, confined to the nine historic counties of Ulster. It is only after 1922 that the records are different.
Elizabeth
