Although a substantial amount of Irish parish records and other resources were destroyed in 1922, during the Irish Civil War, many of the problems we face in tracing our families back in Ireland can be overcome with the use of land records. Among the materials that can help are records of purchases, tenancy, residence, inheritance, taxation and valuation.

From the start of civil registration in Ireland in 1845, records will note where an ancestor lived at the time of registration. In rural areas the townland of residence will be noted, with a townland being a subdivision of a civil parish, while urban-based events will usually state the address of residence. The continued presence of a family in such areas can be further established through annual street directories, with collections available online including those at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and the Lennon Wylie site at lennonwylie.co.uk .

The 1901 and 1911 censuses, available on genealogy.nationalarchives.ie, helpfully provide information about the buildings or farmsteads occupied. On the main householder schedule (‘Form A’) there is a box in the top right corner marked ‘No. on Form B’ which can be used to locate additional information on the property within subsequent documents described as Forms N, B1 and B2, also available on the site. As well as noting information on the class of the house (based on the quality of its walls, roof, and number of windows) Form B1 in particular also names the head of household’s immediate landlord. If a Form B2 is available, this will provide additional detail about outbuildings on a site.

Many of our ancestors rented their properties annually on landed estates, or held them on set duration leases, which could be vulnerable to the whims or circumstances of their landlords. Available online is the ‘Estate Commissioners Offices, Applications From Evicted Tenants, 1907’ database, which lists people who were evicted as tenants and seeking relief as a consequence, and the ‘Landed Estates Court Rentals 1850–1885’ collection, with details of rental rolls from over 8,000 of Ireland’s landed estates, following the bankruptcies of the estate holders after the Famine, in which can be found the names of more than half a million tenants and their rental agreements.

For further details on landed estates in Connacht or Munster, the University of Galway’s Landed Estates Database at www.landedestates.ie contains basic background information for some 4,500 properties from the 1700s to 1914. PRONI’s electronic catalogue also details estate records held in the archive, primarily for the north. The archive’s online guide Introductions to significant privately deposited archives provides additional detailed inventories of deposited materials, but is incomplete. A National Archives of Ireland guide at nationalarchives.ie lists additional collections.

Valuation records can be extremely useful also, with the most complete 19th-century collection being Griffith’s Valuation. This all-island exercise was carried out with a team led by Boundary Commissioner Richard Griffith, with the results published from 1847 to 1864 as The Primary Valuation of Ireland. Although searchable online through various websites, such as TheGenealogist, the most comprehensive presentation is that on Ask About Ireland, which permits searches by surname, forename, county, barony, union or parish. The information returned includes the townland or street name, the landlord’s details, the size of a holding and its annual rateable value. In the left column are references which can be used to identify the exact locations of properties on marked up first edition of the Ordnance Survey map showing their boundaries (as used for the original exercise), also available on the site. To understand how to convert this reference for use on the maps, visit the site’s ‘Understanding the Valuation and Maps’ guide here .

Additional resources used to compile the Primary Valuation, such as field books, house books and mill books, are preserved by the NAI. These have been digitised and can be found as the ‘Valuation Office house, field, tenure and quarto books 1824–1856’ collection on www.genealogy.nationalarchives.ie. Following the valuation, a series of ‘Cancelled Land Books’ for the Republic are available to consult at the Valuation Office in Dublin; these note subsequent changes in ownership, but are not online. The equivalent for Northern Ireland, the ‘Valuation Revision Books’, are available to browse through the PRONI website at .

From 1823 to 1838 a tithe was required to be paid to the Church of Ireland for land across the island, with the records generated a further useful valuation resource. Some areas were exempt from payment, such as church lands, while some parts of the country were not surveyed at all. The records for the Republic (and some cross-border areas) are available at www.genealogy.nationalarchives.ie, while equivalent records for Northern Ireland are available on the PRONI catalogue. To understand how to perform a search for them, consult my blog entry . Note that in the tithe records, the area of holdings was reckoned in ‘Plantation acres’ or ‘Irish acres’, about 1.6 times the size of imperial ‘statute acres’ as later used for Griffith’s Valuation .

Another important resource is the Registry of Deeds, which contains records of property transactions, mortgages, leases, marriage settlements and wills. Microfilmed copies of the records held in Dublin from 1708 to 1929 have been digitised and made freely available by FamilySearch through its catalogue at https://familysearch.org/search/catalog/185720. There are two main finding aids; the Land Index, noting deeds under the names of the townlands in which a property is located, and the Grantors Index, which works better for rare surnames. There is unfortunately no index to grantees, but a volunteer based online database currently under construction at irishdeedsindex.net is heroically in the process of redressing that particular restriction.

The original Registry of Deeds and its successor, the Land Registry (from 1892), can be accessed at the Property Registration Authority (PRA) in Dublin (prai.ie/). For the later Land Registry in the Republic, which is slowly replacing the Registry of Deeds, visit landdirect.ie/, which provides details on how to access the public register for a fee, as well as a useful interactive map to allow you to search for properties. For the Northern Irish equivalent, visit the Department of Finance website at finance-ni.gov.uk/topics/land-registration .

If you can trace your families back to the 17th century, an important land resource is the Down Survey of Ireland, which underpinned the establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy for the next two centuries. Carried out from 1655 to 1658, this was the first attempt to accurately map the island of Ireland prior to the redistribution of land seized from Irish Catholics and given to English Protestants. Although the original Down Survey was destroyed by fire in 1711, it has been faithfully reconstructed from surrogates by Trinity College Dublin at downsurvey.tchpc.tcd.ie, along with the Books of Survey and Distribution.

Following the creation of the Books of Survey and Distribution, payments known as ‘quit rents’ were gathered from the Cromwellian period until the 1930s. These small sums were paid by freeholders or copyholders on manors in the redistributed lands to their lords which freed them of any other further feudal obligations – over time its value diminished so much that it became a token payment. For a useful guide to the former Quit Rent Office in Dublin, and some catalogue holdings of materials at the NAI, visit archivesportaleurope.net/ .

Read Chris’s article about tracing the history of an Irish farm in the new print edition of Discover Your Ancestors, Issue 9, available via www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk