More on Poor Law Unions -- They were a new set of boundaries. As I understand it, state registration of non-Catholic marriages began in Ireland in 1845. All births, deaths and marriages have been registered in Ireland since 1864. Registration was an offshoot of the Victorian public health system, in turn based on the Poor Law, an attempt to provide some measures of relief for the most destitute. Between 1838 and 1852, some 163 workhouses were built throughout Ireland, each at the centre of an area known as a Poor Law Union. The workhouses were normally situated in a large market town, and the Poor Law Union comprised the town and his adjacent area -- with the result that the Unions in may cases ignored the existing boundaries of parishes and counties. In the 1850s, a large-scale public health system was created, based on the areas covered by the Poor Law Unions. Each Union was divided into Dispensary Districts, with an average of six to seven Districts per union. A Medical Officer, normally a doctor, was given responsibility for public health in each District. When the registration of all births, death, and marriages began in 1864, these Dispensary Districts also became Registrars' Districts, with a Registrar responsible for collecting the registration within each District. In most cases the Medical Officer for the Dispensary District acted as the Registrar for the same area, but not in every case. The superior of this local Registrat was the Superintendent Registrar who was responsible for all the Registers within the old Poor Law Union. The returns were indexed and collated centrally, and master indexes for the entire country were produced at the General Register Office in Dublin. These are the indexes which are now used for public research.