Shaw family of Newry Co. Armagh

Hi Karen,

Church records may be helpful in finding your relatives. Church of Ireland parish registers for the period up to 1870 are public records. Registers are available for about one third of the parishes, however many were destroyed in the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922. Most are still held by the local clergy, although some are in the National Archives of Ireland and others are in the Representative Church Body Library in Dublin. A list of all surviving registers is available in the National Archives. http://ireland.anglican.org/about/42 and http://www.nationalarchives.ie/. Presbyterian registers are held in three main locations: in local custody, in the Public Records of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Belfast. PRONI has microfilm copies of almost all registers in Northern Ireland and also lists of records held by the Presbyterian Historical Society. For the rest of Ireland, almost all records are in local custody. It can difficult to locate these as many congregations in the South have moved, amalgamated, or simply disappeared over the last sixty years.

Valuations office in Dublin (http://www.valoff.ie) will have a record of the land registry from 1855 to modern times. This will assist in seeing what happened to any land the family owned (as it usually passed on to a relation). Civil registration records are available from the General Register Office (GRO). These start from 1864. You can access the website here: http://www.groireland.ie/research.htm .

There is lots of useful information to be found in the 1901 and 1911 census records. You can find this here: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/search/ . 

Information from the Irish genealogy database for Armagh are available for a fee at http://armagh.rootsireland.ie/.

I wish you the best of luck with your search.

Please make sure you link anyone else in your family who is interested in their Irish heritage to our site - and indeed anyone else you know of Irish heritage.

Kind regards,

Genealogy Support

Ireland Reaching Out