THE STUDY OF GENEALOGY IN IRELAND
It is sad history that on 13 April, 1922, the building known as the Four Courts in Dublin, the central repository of Ireland’s public records, was set on fire and burned; the flames deliberately fed with the collected muniments of centuries. The main bulk of the state, domestic, and ecclesiastical records of the country was then destroyed. The catastrophe was much the same to Ireland as though in England the contents of the Public Record Office and of Somerset House, together with all the Parish Registers and most of the diocesan transcripts, had suddenly at that same date been irretrievably lost. Whole sections of the standard rungs in the genealogist’s ladder were thus burned out, and the present day searcher into pedigrees in Ireland has to try and clamber back through the years without them. for more click here
