What Next?

You can proceed to use Irish records if you know at least a county of origin in Ireland. Some suggestions for where to begin, and strategies to use, follow here.

What To Do if a County is Known

If you know the county in Ireland in which your ancestors originated, a further goal will often be to identify the parish and townland or town of origin. This more specific locality information will be necessary for accessing local records such as church registers, estate papers, and cemetery transcripts.

Strategies

More research abroad may be needed:  even if a county has been identified, additional research in records abroad may be necessary to make sure that it is the correct county. Relatives within a family may have different counties of origin listed for them on documents. Also, the town or parish may be preserved in records abroad.

Researching all branches of the family abroad: You may still need to trace where various family members emigrated to find a record abroad giving a specific origin within the county. There may be historical information available about where emigrants from the county went abroad (Clare to Australia, Longford/Westmeath to Argentina, Beara Peninsula Cork to mining areas such as in Montana and Utah in the United States) which can be used in tracing where family members may have gone.

Using heritage centres in Ireland: Ireland has a group of heritage centres which have indexed records usually on a county basis. If a county of origin and enough details about the family are known, the centre's index can be searched for record of the family in a specific parish or locality. A centre will no doubt find multiple John Murphys and it will not be possible to know which is the ancestor without more information about the family. Possible additional details include a father's name, mother's maiden name, a birth date, or a group of siblings' names. More information on research at Heritage Centres can be found offsite.

Check IrelandGenWeb and county genealogical guides: You can find out about records available for a particular county by checking the appropriate pages of IrelandGenWeb and/or one of the genealogical guides which has been published to research in a particular county in Ireland.

Records usable with a known county: Some types of records may be accessed when a county of residence but not a parish or town is known. These include:

Censuses or Census Substitutes

Civil Registration

County and Local Libraries

Deeds

Wills & Administrations

Particular Indexed Sources for Specific Counties: Some counties have sources with county-wide indexes. Examples of Irish cemetery transcripts compiled and indexed county-wide include Gravestone Inscriptions, County Down by R.S.J. Clarke and Memorials of the Dead in County Wicklow by Brian J. Cantwell. Census index examples include the index to the 1831 census of County Londonderry (Derry) produced on microfiche by the Derry Inner City Trust and the indexes to the 1901census of Fermanagh and Tyrone produced by Largy Books.

It may be necessary to alternate research in North America and abroad: For example, you may identify five possibilities to be your ancestor in Irish church records. At this point it is important to identify the brothers and sisters of the five candidates as well as their baptismal sponsors. This information can be compared to individuals known to have been associated with your ancestor abroad. It is important to check if there were other people from the same Irish county who settled in the place where your ancestors settled in North America. Can these people be tracked to a common parish of origin within the county with the ancestor? The ancestor may have been part of a congregational migration, group or chain migration.

What to Do if a Specific Place of Origin (Place Name) is Known

There are many different types of place names in Ireland, and many kinds of administrative divisions to keep track of in your research. These divisions include (approximately from larger to smaller in area):

Province
Region
Diocese
County
Barony
Poor Law Union
Superintendent Registrar's District
Civil Parish
Church Parish
City
Registrar's District
Electoral Division
Town
Village
Townland
Sub-townland denomination

In records of an immigrant -- such as a tombstone, family papers, death certificate, or published biographical sketch -- the most common place names found are provinces, geographical regions, counties, parishes, towns, townlands and townland sub-denominations. If a place name of origin is known, a variety of local sources are opened to the researcher, such as church 
records, estate papers, and taxation records.

There are some very good sources for finding just where a particular place name in Ireland was located (in which county and civil parish, for example). These sources are described in detail in the following article: Locating Place Names in Ireland.

You may wish to read an in-depth description of major Irish record sources.

You can find out which of these records is available through the Family History Library by checking the on-line catalog.

Information about records available at Irish repositories are also available on their web sites, whose Internet addresses you can find on this site.