I have found a few Irish baptisms for ancestors, but it's very difficult to trace back, especially pre-famine.
That's an understatement.
Yeah, well, with people dropping dead from starvation and disease on the streets, and civil structure pretty much imploding, keeping records understandably wasn't a high priority.
And then later, when the new government was getting established, some of the parishes sent copies of their records to Dublin (before the 1922 fire), but a lot more of them sent the original records. Which are now lost for all time. Such a disaster that was.
And then, there are parts of Ireland where records were scarce in the first place. My Donegal tracks fade away pre-1850s. There's an individual with the correct name in the correct area to take it back one further generation, but no proof he's "mine" - or just someone with the same name in the same place. They were too poor (as far as I can tell) to pay for a headstone in a churchyard, so even that trace is gone. The one thing that definitely ties me there (aside from the one great-grandmother's records) is my DNA. By some fluke of genetics I come out as being an extremely high match for that area. With all the other geographical areas mixed into my bloodline, I'm somewhat surprised to find that I share so much with that one great-grandmother.
I searched for her burial place in the USA for decades, and found her via another really freakish coincidence. I had been tracing her first husband, no blood relative of mine, and although I knew where and when he died, and had her application for a Civil War Widow's pension based on his service, there was no trace of a grave. The record books at the local RC burial ground didn't list him. I was doing a Google-search for him and got a hit on a transcription of the cemetery's older records that someone had put online a couple of years back. When I put the grave info into another Google search, my GGrandmother's info popped up as being in that grave. That like
NEVER happens! The grave was unmarked, and when the cemetery went back into their daybook for the date in the 1870s they did find info on her husband as being there, with some other info that was useful to me. As he was a Civil War veteran, I was able to get the VA to put a marker on the grave for him. No marker for my ggrandmother, but at least now we know where the grave is - in the middle of a sea of unmarked graves in a very large cemetery. Where you pretty much need a police escort to go into as it's so crime-ridden.
With Irish records you have to take the birth registrations with a grain of salt. They had to pay a fine if they didn't register the births within a certain amount of time. (At least, I was told this a few years back.) So it's not uncommon for there to be a record of a baptism for someone that pre-dates the civil record by a large time period. (Potentially years - when they got the money together to pay the fine.) Or not recorded in the civil records at all. Now, I don't know how true that it, but I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility.
Of course, with the Irish, if they had a child and named it, for instance, James, after the father, and it died, the next boy that happened along (probably within a year
) would also be named James. I've got one case where the poor mother lost four in a row, so there are four James born to her, spaced, yeah, about a year apart. Only the first one appears in the civil records for births. He does pop up in marriage records, but the date of birth is 4 years later. Took a little bit of sleuthing, to sort that one out.
If you like puzzles, genealogy is definitely addictive!
