Mills Ballymoney

[celtic root]

Looking into my Girlfriends family, tracing her father lineage back to Ballymoney, Antrim.

Henry Leitch Mills born (c1923) son to William Mills & Elizabeth Gillian....in or around Ballymoney.....using Ballymoney Ancestry, there is a family living in Roddenfoot, wonder if there is any connection.

[Elwyn Soutter]

William Mills marriage to Elizabeth Gillian was registered in Ballymoney July – Sept 1921 Volume 1, page 721. His father’s name was Alexander, hers was Felix.

This therefore looks like the Mills family in the 1901 & 1911 censuses, in Roddenfoot St as you suspected:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Antrim/Ballymoney__Urban__and_Ballymoney_Urban_District/Roddenfoot_Street/1009136/

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Antrim/Ballymoney/Rodenfoot_Street/125848/

This is probably Elizabeth in the censuses too:
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1911/Antrim/Seacon/Coldagh/126445/

Her parents were Felix Gillen and Lizzie M’Keague whose marriage was registered in Ballycastle Apr – Jun 1888, Volume 1, page 89.

[celtic root]

Thanks, do you know where I can obtain DOB for the children? Just I would like to dig back a wee bit further and expand sideways as well, think some other ancestors came from Tyrone as well.

[Elwyn Soutter]

Statutory registration of births in Ireland started on 1.1.1864. The index to those births is on the LDS Beta site:

www.familysearch.org/search/collection/show#uri=http://hr-search-api:8080/searchapi/search/collection/1408347

There are also pay to view sites which have some of the birth information (but not always all years). For births prior to 31.12.1921, a cheap way of getting a birth, death or marriage certificate is to order it from GRO Roscommon. Provided you quote the place, year, quarter (if one is given), volume and page number (all of which are on the Beta site) a photocopy will only cost €4.

www.groireland.ie/

For births prior to 1864, you will need to rely on parish records. There is no central index and you need to know which church the family attended. Not all of those records are on line, but most have been microfilmed and can be accessed at PRONI. Your Mills family was Church of Ireland, so you probably need Ballymoney COI records, which start in 1807. Your Gillen/Gillian family was Presbyterian (which normally indicates they were of Scottish origin) and so you need to locate their church. Presbyterians in Ireland don’t operate a parish system and so which church they attended would be based on personal preference rather than simply where they lived. There are several Presbyterian churches in that area and you might need to check more than one to find them. But you could start with the one where the marriage took place in (though tradition was to marry in the bride’s church after which she would attend her husbands, so unless they both attended the same church anyway, it might not be the family church).

Details of most of the surviving church records are on the PRONI website. You’ll see that some churches declined to have their records copied and these are described as being “in local custody.” If that applies then obviously you need to contact the particular church.

http://www.proni.gov.uk/index/research_and_records_held/catalogues_guides_indexes_and_leaflets/online_guides_and_indexes.htm

Births etc from 1.1.1922 onwards are not on line, and you really need to contact GRONI in Belfast. I think they cost £16 each plus any search fees.
www.nidirect.gov.uk/gro

Statutory recording of births and deaths started, as I mentioned earlier, on 1.1.1864. Protestant and nonconformist marriage registration started on 1.4.1845. RC marriages on 1.1.1864. Indexes to all of those are on the LDS beta site.