I too have a personal experience of trying to obtain the death certificate of my grandmother who died in Dublin in 1944. The GRO in Joyce House said they had looked either side of the death date shown on my grandparents headstone - incidentally it even had the full address of where they lived - but they couldn't find it. Would I like to register it? I didn't bother to do that since we would be travelling to Ireland in a year or so and I would be taking time out to go the Joyce House. Within 10 minutes of arriving at Joyce House (a couple of years later) I had the reference number and shortly after that a photo copy of the Register Entry! If he was in receipt of a military or civilian pension there may well be a record available there. Stuart

Thank you for your response Stuart, and for the tip about looking into a possible military pension. My grandfather's death is not registered in the indexes, nor is his birth in 1898, which is where my difficulty lies, so there is no reference number to go by. It seems I can not get his birth cert nor his death cert, both of which pieces of paperwork I would really like to have, to substantiate my family history. I never knew the man, as he died before I was born when my mother, his daughter, was only 14. I wonder was there a larger picture happening in Dublin in the mid-1940s that we are currently unaware of? Which might help explain the lack of recording of some people's deaths. I know it was the end of WW2, but Ireland wasn't involved in that. It might just be something innocuous like a clerical error. Debby Raymond, Queensland, Australia.