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I stared my family tree some time ago . I can only go back to the 1830 due to the penal laws in Ireland . The ritch people went to Spain or France to get married . What about the poor people where did they get married .at the the(Catholic Church was banned) where did they get baptised or married . If their are any records from that time where they stored .
M3
The Penal Laws didn't ban Catholics from marrying. They made it difficult for the church to operate but it carried on. Catholics in Ireland married before a priest all through the 1600s and 1800s and beyond. The Penal Laws were gradually lifted during that period. Most were gone by 1750 though a few remained eg the restriction on a Catholic being a Member of Parliament didn’t go till the 1820s.
The issue you face is a lack of written records. In many cases the priest didn’t have a church for his religious services (they used Mass Rocks in remote places instead) so keeping written records of baptisms and marriages wouldn’t have been high on his agenda. However some parishes did keep records in that period especially in urban areas like Dublin, so I am not sure whether the lack of records was always due to the Penal Laws or perhaps just an indifference to keeping records. For example, St Michan’s parish in Dublin has records from 1726 onwards and some other Dublin parishes also have records from that period. But most parishes in Donegal didn’t bother keeping records till 1850 or beyond. That can’t have been anything to do with the Penal Laws, which had been repealed 50 years or more previously. More to do with local arrangements about record keeping, I think.
https://www.johngrenham.com/records/...=Dublin%20city
Most of the surviving RC records are on-line on the nli site. There are some dating to the 1700s but most start in the 1800s:
https://registers.nli.ie
If you can’t find your ancestor's marriage it doesn't mean they didn’t marry in the Catholic church, just that no record was kept.
Thank you for this great explanation on Irish records Elwyn and the two Links. Your link to John Grenham led me to his home site and his Wizard search which occupied a few minutes and although nothing major resulted about my great great grandmother I did get some small pieces of interesting general information
Saved to my Ireland resources folder :smile5:
Christina
Thank you very much I never knew that before .you are wonderful
Maurice
Thank you very much you are wonderful.
Maurice