Wasn’t everything destroyed in 1922?

Everything was not destroyed in 1922. The Irish Public Record Office was indeed blown up in the Civil War, with the loss of all its contents, the most important of which were:

·          the surviving 19^th century census returns,

·          about two-thirds of the Church of Ireland parish registers

·          all of the surviving wills probated in Ireland .

The loss of the census returns was especially painful, but any records not in the Public Record Office in 1922 have survived. These include non-Church of Ireland parish records, civil records of births, marriages and deaths, property records and later censuses. And for much of the material that was lost, there are abstracts, transcripts and fragments of the originals.   Another effect of 1922 is that Irish records are very centralised – almost everything of interest can be found in the Dublin institutions. The only major pre-1922 records held exclusively outside Dublin are the Ulster dissenters’ church registers in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast