David has been busy with look-ups of what remains of the 1831 census. I notice that the CD gives a location as 'township'. I looked it up as I thought it might have been a mis-rendering of townland. Of the few I looked at the location seems to be either the Irish parish or town. I assume the index was produced in USA - hence the very un-Irish township. I'd be interested to know the definition of 'township' - does it equate to our 'town'. In case anyone new to Irish locations is confused the PRONI website has a good article on townlands. Rachel Spellcheck says townland is not in the dictionary -too right it isn't.

Rachel, A townland is the smallest division of land in Ireland. Each civil parish contains many townlands. Townlands are very variable in size, generally smaller in fertile areas and larger in barren or boggy areas. More often than not the townland name is of Gaelic origin. The CD index to the 1831 census does not include the townland. It only includes the civil parish or town and the page number. However, the 1831 census itself does include the townland, in fact it is arranged by townland. Before the CD index was compiled, an earlier microfiche index was compiled which did include the townland. My experience has been that both indexes to the 1831 census contain mistakes. The CD index has quite a lot of wrong transcriptions and cases where one name ends up appearing twice in the index. I strongly suspect that it was compiled by people with little or no specialist knowledge of Irish local or family history. The index is a valuable guide but I strongly recommend viewing the original on microfilm. The whole 1831 census for the county is on 4 microfilms. I've never seen the term township used in Irish records. Big thanks to David for all the lookups he has done. Rachel wrote: > David has been busy with look-ups of what remains of the 1831 census. I notice that the CD gives a location as 'township'. I looked it up as I thought it might have been a mis-rendering of townland. Of the few I looked at the location seems to be either the Irish parish or town. > I assume the index was produced in USA - hence the very un-Irish township. > > I'd be interested to know the definition of 'township' - does it equate to our 'town'. In case anyone new to Irish locations is confused the PRONI website has a good article on townlands. > > Rachel > > Spellcheck says townland is not in the dictionary -too right it isn't. > > ==== NIR-DERRY Mailing List ==== > ~~ The List's Golden Rule ~~ > Keep to genealogy, history, anything ancestors! Keep it Clean & Cool! > Treat others like you want them to treat you ... But *NO* selling! > > ============================== > To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: > http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237