RESEARCHING IRELAND -1 Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland Civil registration of non-Catholic marriages began in Ireland on 1 April 1845, but full statutory registration of all births, deaths and marriages did not start throughout the whole of Ireland until 1 January 1864. It is known that some events after 1864, particularly births and marriages, went unrecorded in Ireland. Some estimates suggest as many as 15 per cent of Irish births and marriages were never registered, especially in the early years. The Irish system of state registration was based on the catchment areas of public health districts that in turn were divisions within the old Poor Law Unions with a communal workhouse. These districts were known as 'Registration Districts', each in the control of a superintendent registrar. Registration districts were subdivided into smaller areas known as 'Registrar's Districts' (or 'Dispensary Districts') where local registrars, responsible to their superintendent registrars, collected the registrations of events within each district. Until 1922 these were collated and indexed and details passed on to the Registrar General for Ireland, at the General Register Office in Dublin, where national master indexes and registers for the entire country were produced. Two Systems In 1922 Ireland was divided into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland comprised the six north-eastern counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. The Irish Free State comprised the remaining 26 counties of Ireland being Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Leitrim, Limerick, Longford, Louth, Mayo, Meath, Offaly, Monaghan, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow. The Irish Free State adopted the name of Eire under its 1937 constitution and did not become the Republic of Ireland until 1949, at which point it left the (British) Commonwealth. This division of Ireland in 1922 means that separate systems of civil registration have been conducted from that date in both Northern Ireland and in what is now the Republic of Ireland. =============================================================== ©Cara_Links Researching Co.Wicklow,Wexford. A friend is one who accepts your past, loves you as you are, and believes in your tomorrows