Application form

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The more relevant information that you collect and provide about your emigrant ancestor(s) and immediate family members, the more likely a successful outcome to the research. At a minimum, please provide any names, dates and places that you know, and an indication of your confidence in the accuracy of each piece of information supplied.

Information available to you but not readily available to our researchers includes the memories of your living relatives (not necessarily your oldest living relatives), your family archives and public records in your own country.

Your family archives may include family bibles, letters, wills, deeds and other papers; prayer cards or in memoriam cards; birth, marriage and death certificates; scrapbooks, obituaries and other newspaper cuttings; family photographs, especially the rare ones with names, dates and places written on the back; tombstone inscriptions and other cemetery records; and countless similar items. Many successful searches begin with an old semi-legible manuscript that has been passed down through the generations.

Click here to complete an Application Form

If you do not have public records such as birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns, tombstone inscriptions or cemetery records, you may be able to obtain them from local sources more easily than Irish-based researchers can. Birth, marriage or death certificates in many overseas jurisdictions give details of parents, siblings or children, even those born in Ireland, which are unavailable in Irish sources.

Even if you have very little information, we will do our best with what you provide. Remember, however, that a search can only be as good as the information provided, and as the records which have survived from the relevant area and time period. As there are almost no surviving Irish census records from before 1901, no civil records of births, marriages or deaths before 1845, and few surviving Catholic parish registers from before Catholic Emancipation in 1829, genealogical research in Ireland is more difficult than in many other countries. Our researchers are experts at making the best possible use of other records which have survived.

A typical research project begins with one primary subject of research who was born in Ireland (generally an emigrant ancestor) and works backwards in time.

If you would like research carried out on more than one primary subject from different sides of your ancestry, please complete a separate form for each one.