So is there any hope for me ever to find a COI Parish Record of marriage or birth for Counties Dublin, Kildare, Tipperary between 1820 through 1835?  I have an ancestor born in Dublin (1820-1835 - various discrepencies in her age from USA census records and obituary ), but with siblings born in Kildare County.  I did find a possible marriage record for her parents in 1832 in Dublin at the Irish Geneology site , but if she was really born in the 1820s there could have been a previous wife for her father (which marriage may have occurred in Kildare rather than Dublin .  (But maybe she was born in Dublin County and baptized in Kildare County, although the marriage record states that both parents were then living in Dublin.) I also would love to find a COI birth record a generation earlier between 1790 and 1805, probably in Rathangan, County Kildare.  I suppose my question is, "Are there any alternative routes to such information?" Consider me stuck. John -------------------------------------- Message: 7 Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 19:37:47 EST From: [email protected] Subject: [IRL-DUBLIN] IRL[DUBLIN] Records found in Dublin To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" The following taken from the web:   _http://www.movinghere.org.uk/help/glossary.htm#testamentary_collections_ (http://www.movinghere.org.uk/help/glossary.htm#testamentary_collections)     >>The records were all destroyed in 1922 <<   No, they weren't. The Public Record Office in Dublin was indeed destroyed during the Irish Civil War in 1922, along with virtually all its holdings. >From the point of view of genealogy, the most significant losses were the 19th-century census returns, the Church of Ireland parish registers and the _testamentary collections_ (http://www.movinghere.org.uk/help/glossary.htm#testamentary_collections) . Anything not in the PRO has survived, including non-Church of Ireland parish records, civil records of births, marriages and deaths, property records and later censuses. For much of the material that was lost, there are abstracts, transcripts and fragments of the originals.   >>Irish research is impossibly difficult <<   To the contrary, there is actually quite a compact set of relevant records, almost all held centrally in Dublin or Belfast. If you start with enough information - in particular, a place of origin in Ireland - research is actually very straightforward.   >>All the records for Northern Ireland are held in Belfast and those for the Republic of Ireland are in Dublin <<   Wrong again. Until 1922 the entire island was one administrative unit. Both Dublin and Belfast _repositories_ (http://www.movinghere.org.uk/help/glossary.htm#repositories)  have at least copies of the pre-1922 records, with those in Belfast largely, but not completely, confined to the nine historic counties of Ulster. It is only after 1922 that the records are different.