Irish Poor Law Unions

The Irish Famine - Scene at the Gate of the Workhouse (Wikimedia Commons)

The Irish Poor Law Unions were created following the 1838 Irish Poor Law Act and you can read all about the Workhouse in Ireland on Peter Higginbotham's brilliant website. It is dedicated to the history of the Workhouse all over Great Britain and you can learn so much more and do the checks I recommend below.

Much documentation was generated e.g. admissions, births, deaths, punishments and also business records e.g. meeting minutes etc. Your ancestors may have been inmates, staff or possibly local tradesmen who supplied the workhouses. Unfortunately the survival rates for the various records are very variable - county archives are usually where you can find what does survive and there are links for them on my County Recipe pages. There are some records available to browse on FamilySearch - see my Poor Law Records page for more information.

Here are some facts and my tips for trying to navigate the Poor Law Unions in search of your ancestors;

Click on this Poor Law Union Map link to see how they were distributed over Ireland c.1850. Although they appear to fit within the 4 provincial boundaries, they do not all fit neatly into county boundaries and you may also find that they split parishes. Peter Higginbotham's Workhouse site has bigger maps that are a bit easier to navigate to the Workhouse history pages, just click on the one of these Province names to go to the right page - Connaught, Leinster, Munster & Ulster

Initially there were 130 Poor Law Unions created, each of which elected a Board of Guardians from across the District Electoral Divisions (DEDs) that made up the Poor Law Union, each of which in turn consisted of several named townlands. These divisions also featured in 1901 & 1911 census geography. Therefore, you will need to use this Placenames search page to look for the place (townland) you are interested in to find out which Poor Law Union it was in.

Union workhouses were built to standard designs usually in the town bearing the same name as the Poor Law Union but not always. They were designed to serve roughly the surrounding 10-mile radius of townlands, hence why their boundaries split counties and parishes. It usually took about 2 years to build a workhouse but they did not immediately take in people as soon as they were built - it could take several years to raise the finances to be able to run the workhouses as collecting the Poor Law Rate from the local communities could be difficult. Check when the workhouse started admitting inmates to see if this start date is relevant to the time period you think your ancestors might have lived through.

However, but by the end of the 1840's, overcrowding led to the creation of 33 additional Poor Law Unions in around 1850. This was achieved by sub-dividing and reapportioning some townlands of the existing Unions, mostly in the counties of the provinces of Connaught and Munster. Check to see if the Poor Law Union you are interested in was formed later from parts of other Unions and so you may need to check another set of records for the previous decade.

Prior to the 1838 Act, there had already been a history of providing the poor with the means to support themselves via "Houses of Industry" in some of the largest towns e.g. Dublin, Cork, Limerick etc. Check the history of any urban Poor Law Unions that you think might be relevant to your family history to see if there were any of these earlier institutions that your ancestors might have been involved with (although it is not known how good the record survival for these places might be?)

Not all Poor Law Unions were able to operate successfully and some were dissolved (generally in the 1880's) and their areas of responsibility reassigned to neighbouring Unions. Check any known dissolution dates to see if the Poor Law Union that you are interested in did not survive intact until the end of the system and therefore you may need to look for another set of records for the later years.

If records have survived, look out for Indoor and Outdoor relief registers - the former for inmates of the workhouse, the latter for people who were helped in their own homes. You might also find the former described as Admission and Discharge registers in different time periods. Registers of Births and Deaths were also kept. However, survival of these genealogically important records is very varied and you will probably find that it is the Board of Guardians Minute books that have survived, detailing the weekly meetings and their outcomes - a fascinating insight into the practicalities of running these institutions. Check the catalogues for the archives, national and/or local, that may hold surviving records. This is usually the county archive service for the county in which the workhouse for the Poor Law Union was built, even if it covered townlands in neighbouring counties.

Many workhouses went on to become hospitals and care homes but equally, many ended up abandoned and derelict and eventually had to be demolished and the sites may have been built over. Many workhouses also had their own chapels and burial grounds but especially during the Famine years there were many mass graves. However, several remaining sites have constructed memorial monuments or sculptures to mark the burial sites and remember the many victims. If you are interested in planning a visit to the any workhouse sites, check their history pages on the Workhouse site carefully to see what if anything of the former buildings survive.

The workhouse system was officially disbanded in the 1920's in the South following the partition of Ireland, but the Poor Law Unions appear to have persisted in the North right up to the formation of the UK welfare system in 1948. However, the names and shapes of the Poor Law Unions effectively lived on in the form of Superintendents Registrar Districts, or more commonly known as Civil Registration Districts, which have been used to register non-Catholic marriages since 1845 and all marriages, births and deaths since 1865. If you are looking for registered births, marriages and deaths check the Registration District with the same name as the Poor Law Union first for the place where you think the event took place e.g. townland. If you are not successful with that search, widen it to neighbouring Registration Districts.

Read On... Poor Law Records

(c) Irish Geneaography - 2022