Customs & Excise Officers
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PictureCustoms House, Dublin (Bjorn Christian Torrissen, Wikimedia Commons)

My 5x Great Grandfather, Joseph Barker, was a Land Carriage Officer in Georgian Dublin, which no doubt saw him busy along the wharves and quays of the River Liffey.  Just as today, the Customs department of government no doubt generated vast forests of paperwork, but I'm not completely sure about the survival of the records and their location today.   I am still on the quest for records from Joseph Barker's career, but I have stumbled across some useful, albeit limited, resources.

Customs and Excise Superannuations, Ireland is a short document dated 1832 that is packed with details of Customs Officers who retired from the service in the first three decades of the 19th century.  Some of these men had long careers, and I am sure you will be delighted to find, their ages on retirement were recorded.

The other resource that is worth plundering is the Dublin Gazette, 1750-1800, available via FindMyPast (subscription.)  As the official government publication, you may, like me, find details of appointments to the service.

Dr. Jane Lyons From-Ireland website also has a transcribed list of Revenue Officers from 1709, but it's not clear what the original source is.

The Irish Genealogical Research Society has an index to newspaper announcements that mention Customs & Excise and Inland Revenue officers.  It's called the Smythe-Wood Custom & Excise: Card Index Transcripts and is a browsable PDF document with alphabetic entries.  Note the codes used for the original source newspaper and the date and you should be able to look up the notice yourself if you have access to a subscription that includes Irish Newspapers - follow this link in green for more information.

​Given the changing structure of government in Ireland over the last 300 years or so, I expect that there may well be more surviving documents, perhaps split between the National Archives of Ireland and the National Archives at Kew (TNA)? I did come across this brief article on "Tracing the Career of a Customs or Excise Officer" via the Co. Mayo IGP page, which contains some useful guidance on definitions and it seems to reference several sets of documents with specific TNA references, both for British and Irish services.  The article also suggests that many of the records had been filmed and were available via "LDS Libraries" - I've tried searching the FamilySearch catalogue with a range of terms but I cannot find them?

Here are some of the relevant references I found myself in the TNA catalogue, all of which are not digitised and are only accessible at Kew;
If the National Archives of Ireland has any relevant records, they are well hidden in the catalogue.  Do let me know if you find anything interesting.
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2021