This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/DYC.2ACE/1337.1.1.1 Message Board Post: Hello Fran, Thank you very much for your return letter. For Catholic Church records you can send a letter to the Parish Priest, Father Luke Mcwilliams, and request a search in the parish registers for the family of Adair Magee. The Adair Magee found in Griffiths Valuation, living in Dundrod, Tullyrusk civil parish, may not be the same Adair whose daughter was Cassie. Cassie may have been baptized in a civil parish other than Tullyrusk, in which case her baptism would not be in the church registers for the Catholic Parish of Glenavy & Kilead. But to see if there are any records for the Adair found in Griffiths, and his family, contact the Rev. Luke Williams in Glenavy. Please see below: Very Rev. Luke McWilliams, Parish Priest, St. Joseph’s Presbytery, 59 Chapel Road, Glenavy, Crumlin, Co. Antrim, BT29 4LY Northern Ireland In the last few years Fran I've been in contact with several people who have written to parish priests in Ireland, requesting look-ups in the parish registers. It appears that several parish priests do not bother to respond at all, or write back stating they can no longer search their parish registers because of the volume of requests they receive from people searching their family history. If you do not hear back from Father McWilliams after two months, or if you receive a letter stating that the church registers cannot be searched, you will have to engage the services of the Ulster Historical Sociery (UHS), which was mentioned in the last email. The UHF will charge you an amount based on how much research needs to be undertaken in searching for church, civil, or census records of your Magees. But, in looking at further information from the UHF, I see that they have computerized most of the 19th century Catholic registers for County Antrim. I am not sure if you went to the UHF website to look at the Magee records I found, but doing so may save you time and money, and also confirm which town and civil parish they were living in in the 1880s. The UHF will also be able to locate civil registration records of births and marriages for your Magees, as civil registration in Ireland for all religious denominations began in 1864. Information I found about the records the UHF has computerized is just below: "It should be noted that whilst our database currently comprises almost two million records it is still developing and, as yet, we have not computerised many protestant church registers outside of Belfast (this work is in progress). We have computerised almost all the pre-1900 Roman Catholic church registers for Counties Antrim and Down, including Belfast. We have also computerised almost all the pre-1922 civil marriage registers (protestant 1845-, Roman Catholic 1864-) for this area. In addition to this type of record searching of our computerised holdings, we can provide a full archival research service that will cover records not yet captured on our database." ____________ Irish research seems to be getting more challenging and more expensive as time goes on. But, I hope you can find more records pertaining to Adair Magee and his family. Thank you again for writing back, and don't hesitate to write again if you have any questions. I hope you can go to County Antrim someday to see where your ancestors had lived. Best Wishes Fran, Dave Boylan