This Irish Genealogy site offers the Irish descendant (from New York, Canada, UK, Australia...) the chance to trace their Irish family tree and search for their surname origins and the records of their Irish ancestor's birth, marriage or death.

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Kyle J. Betit is a professional genealogist, lecturer and author residing in Salt Lake City, Utah. Kyle specializes in Irish and immigration research. Kyle Betit is Research Director of ProGenealogists, Inc., in Salt Lake City and the author of the Irish Genealogy Pages at http://www.progenealogists.com/ireland/

Irish Church Records Online

Tracing your family history in Ireland is becoming easier! One reason is that two major websites now host indexes and abstracts of Irish church records. Since Irish civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths only began in 1864 (with the exception of Protestant marriages beginning earlier), one usually needs to use church records before 1864 to document births (baptisms), marriages and death (burials).

The county-based indexing centres of the Irish Family History Foundation have gradually placed indexes to Irish church records online for most of the island in the IFHF Online Research System on the web site http://www.irish-roots.ie . Both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are included. County Derry (Londonderry) was one of those most recently added. The system now includes 28 of the 36 counties on the island of Ireland (including both modern-day Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The contact details for the county-based indexing centres (including centres whose indexes are not online) are available online here.

Another web site hosting Irish church records indexes is the http://www.irishgenealogy.ie web site maintained by the government Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. This web site has previously hosted records indexes for 11 Irish counties in the Central Signposting Index. Some exciting news is that this site has posted records from County Kerry and Dublin City recently. It will soon include more online digitized church records for areas of Ireland that have been previously unindexed (or the existing indexes were inaccessible): County Carlow, Dublin, south and west parts of County Cork, Cork City, and County Kerry. An interesting article on the subject was posted on the Diocese of Kerry web site. For further developments in Irish church records indexing and other news of Irish genealogy see the ProGenealogists.com Irish Genealogy News Page. Also, a table showing where Irish church records are available online, by COUNTY, is available here.

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