- The records
- Counties
- Maps
- Emigration
- Addresses
- Links
-
Articles
- Irish Roots column
-
Periodicals
Irish in South Africa McGoogins of Armoy Irlandeses en la Argentina Somme Association Records Miracle The Back of an Envelope South American Irish Irish Roots Problem Page Surnames of Monaghan Irish citizenship by descent Scots-Irish in Colonial America Irish Place Names and the Immigrant Colonial Scots-Irish Immigrants: The Irish Records Huguenots Castlegar Codys in New Zealand Duggans of Galway
- General articles
Registry of Deeds
THE SCOPE OF THE RECORDS
Because research in the Registry of Deeds can be laborious and timeconsuming,
it is a good idea to be aware of the limitations of its records
before starting work there. The Registry was set up by the Irish Parliament
in 1708 to help regularise the massive transfer of land ownership from the Roman
Catholic, Anglo-Norman and Gaelic populations to the Protestant Anglo-Irish
that had taken place over the preceding century. The registration of deeds was not
obligatory: the function of the Registry was simply to provide evidence of legal
title in the event of a dispute. These two facts-the voluntary nature of registration
and the general aim of copperfastening the Cromwellian and Williamite
confiscations-determine the nature of the records held by the Registry. The
overwhelming majority deal with property-owning members of the Church of
Ireland, and a disproportionate number of these relate to transactions that
carried some risk of legal dispute. In other words, the deeds registered are
generally of interest only for a minority of the population and constitute only a
small fraction of the total number of property transactions carried out in the
country.
The implications of these facts are worth spelling out in detail. Over the most
useful period of the Registry's records, the non-Roman Catholic population of
Ireland comprised, at most, a fifth of the total. A high proportion of these were
dissenting Presbyterians, largely concentrated in the north and suffering
restrictions on their property rights similar to, though not as severe as, those
imposed on Catholics; very few deeds made by dissenting Protestants are
registered. Of the remaining non-Roman Catholics the majority were small
farmers, tradesmen or artisans, usually in a position of economic dependence on
those with whom they might have property transactions and therefore in no
position to dispute the terms of a deed. As a result, the records of the Registry
cover only a small number of the non-Roman Catholic minority. There are
exceptions, of course, for example large landlords who made and registered great
numbers of leases with their smaller tenants; marriage settlements between
families of relatively modest means; the business transactions of the small
Catholic merchant class; or the registration of the holdings of the few surviving
Catholic landowners after the relaxation of the Penal Laws in the 1780s. These are
definitely exceptions, however, and for the vast bulk of the population-the
Catholic tenant-farmers-the possibility of a deed having been registered can
almost certainly be discounted, as they owned virtually nothing and had only
tenuous legal rights to the property they occupied.
A further limit to the scope of the records is the scant use made of the Registry
before the middle of the eighteenth century. It was only from about that time that
registration became even relatively widespread, and its major genealogical
usefulness is for the century or so from then until the 1850s, when it is generally
superseded by other sources.
With these caveats in mind, it should now be said that for those who made and registered deeds, the records of the Registry can often provide superb information. The inclination to register deeds appears to have run in families: a single document can name two or three generations and can also lead back to a chain of related records that give a picture of the family's evolving fortunes and the network of its collateral relationships.
