Thread: William Ward

Marriage look up if possible please..
William Ward (boot repairer), father of Thomas Reid Ward, early 1800s.
Many thanks.. P.D.

Statutory records of births, deaths & marriages started in Ireland on 1.1.1864 (1st April 1845 for Protestant and Non-Conformist marriages). Prior to that you are heavily dependant on church records, where they exist. (Some have been lost, some are incomplete and some are not yet on line).

To use church records effectively, because there’s no centralised index, ideally you need to know the ancestor’s exact religion, townland and parish in Ireland. (Otherwise it’s a needle in a haystack). Good sources are censuses which sometimes include place of birth, and age (eg England/US. Look out also for other Irish people nearby in the censuses. Immigrants often settled near people they knew from home. Check military records, old diaries, gravestones, family bibles, wills and obituaries. Birth certs for some locations (e.g. Scotland) include place of marriage of parents. Marriage certs in some locations (e.g. US States) can include places of birth, parents, etc for bride and groom. Funeral home records can be very informative. Death certs (e.g. US, Australia & Scotland) can show parents names.

Once you have found where your ancestor came from you need to search the parish registers. For Northern Ireland, the Public Record Office (PRONI) has copies of many of the parish registers, and has a list of those held elsewhere. www.proni.gov.uk/
For the Republic of Ireland the records are held by the National Library National Library of Ireland - Homepage It is also usually possible to order copies of the microfilmed records in to your nearest LDS library, for a small fee.

Some Irish BDM records are searchable on line on the LDS pilot and Beta sites, but some records are still held by the individual church (some declined to allow their records to be copied) and so those websites are not the complete picture:

FamilySearch Record Search

www.familysearch.org/



Elwyn