The Registry of Deeds - Online Access
The older records which are probably most interesting to genealogists are NOT currently accessible on-line via the Property Registration Authority of Ireland website. However, there are 3 ways of getting remote access to the information in these records, either in whole or part;
FamilySearch Microfilm Image
(Click to enlarge)
FamilySearch
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) filmed all of the Grantor indexes, Townland Indexes and Transcript Books many decades ago. There are over 2800 microfilm reels in the collection which you will find in their main catalogue under the following entry - Transcripts of memorials of deeds, conveyances and wills, 1708-1929.
Digital images of these films are now all available to browse for free online and download via FamilySearch as long as you have registered with them. The catalogue list runs to 27 pages with the Grantor Indexes on the first 2 pages. Land Indexes (later catalogued as Place Name Indexes) start towards the bottom of page 2. The Transcript Books are catalogued under "Deeds etc." labels that start near the top of page 8 and include the volume number and years covered. Note there may be more than one volume on these films and there may be multiple volumes covering the same year. The cataloguing style has changed over the years and there are plenty of spelling mistakes, especially of county names, so be careful not to just rely on quick text searching via Ctrl-F.
I have tried to make sense of the many townland indexes by creating what I call my Townland Indexes Timelines for each county - follow the link to learn more.
As you can see from the image above left, these images were filmed over 70 years ago which means some of the images may not be of great quality. When I viewed the original microfilms at the TNA several years ago, their microfilm readers had some useful functions to vary brightness and contrast which was very helpful. You might be able to improve the readability by downloading any images and playing around with whatever imaging software you might have to enhance them.
The following pages have more information on using the finding aids and deciphering the deeds;
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) filmed all of the Grantor indexes, Townland Indexes and Transcript Books many decades ago. There are over 2800 microfilm reels in the collection which you will find in their main catalogue under the following entry - Transcripts of memorials of deeds, conveyances and wills, 1708-1929.
Digital images of these films are now all available to browse for free online and download via FamilySearch as long as you have registered with them. The catalogue list runs to 27 pages with the Grantor Indexes on the first 2 pages. Land Indexes (later catalogued as Place Name Indexes) start towards the bottom of page 2. The Transcript Books are catalogued under "Deeds etc." labels that start near the top of page 8 and include the volume number and years covered. Note there may be more than one volume on these films and there may be multiple volumes covering the same year. The cataloguing style has changed over the years and there are plenty of spelling mistakes, especially of county names, so be careful not to just rely on quick text searching via Ctrl-F.
I have tried to make sense of the many townland indexes by creating what I call my Townland Indexes Timelines for each county - follow the link to learn more.
As you can see from the image above left, these images were filmed over 70 years ago which means some of the images may not be of great quality. When I viewed the original microfilms at the TNA several years ago, their microfilm readers had some useful functions to vary brightness and contrast which was very helpful. You might be able to improve the readability by downloading any images and playing around with whatever imaging software you might have to enhance them.
The following pages have more information on using the finding aids and deciphering the deeds;
Record counter from the site
Registry of Deeds Index Project
The Registry of Deeds Index Project Ireland is a volunteer project which has been going for several years and is slowly building up into a free to view index of transcribed name entries from the actual memorial transcripts, not just the indexes. Inevitably this is a very labour-intensive process and the actual numbers of deeds that have been indexed are but a fraction of the total. However, you may get lucky and find something of interest to your research here - I certainly have.
Volunteers have also started working with the Grantor and Townland Indexes too, but the coverage is currently extremely low (see image.) In theory, you ought to be able to search on a townland (aka denomination), but I'm not sure what the geographical coverage is for this data as all my searches for Co. Wicklow and Co. Carlow townlands have come back as zero so far? However, I appreciate that it is an entirely collaborative project, reliant on volunteers free to choose their own volumes of interest.
The web site is designed in a very particular old-fashioned style that I confess I'm not a fan of. This means that you will have to be fairly methodical when playing "letterbox Scrabble" on the search screens, of which there are several - best to have a play yourself. The contents of each deed have been fragmented into bits of searchable data and there has been liberal use made of codes to try to standardise the entries. This works fine for relatively simple deeds but can become a bit tortuous for more complex deeds. For the deeds that have been indexed, you can also link directly through to the FamilySearch image (buried as a small grey button at the bottom of the deed page.)
If you have some copies of deeds yourself, you can contribute to the project, albeit that the multiplicity of speadsheet templates that you are encouraged to download from the website are rather overwrought in my opinion.
However, having said all that, this project is a labour of love for the contributors involved and in the absence of any other form of online index for these records, we should be very grateful for their generosity in freely sharing their ongoing efforts. It is also worth making a note to check back regularly to see what might have been added for your names or places of interest.
The Registry of Deeds Index Project Ireland is a volunteer project which has been going for several years and is slowly building up into a free to view index of transcribed name entries from the actual memorial transcripts, not just the indexes. Inevitably this is a very labour-intensive process and the actual numbers of deeds that have been indexed are but a fraction of the total. However, you may get lucky and find something of interest to your research here - I certainly have.
Volunteers have also started working with the Grantor and Townland Indexes too, but the coverage is currently extremely low (see image.) In theory, you ought to be able to search on a townland (aka denomination), but I'm not sure what the geographical coverage is for this data as all my searches for Co. Wicklow and Co. Carlow townlands have come back as zero so far? However, I appreciate that it is an entirely collaborative project, reliant on volunteers free to choose their own volumes of interest.
The web site is designed in a very particular old-fashioned style that I confess I'm not a fan of. This means that you will have to be fairly methodical when playing "letterbox Scrabble" on the search screens, of which there are several - best to have a play yourself. The contents of each deed have been fragmented into bits of searchable data and there has been liberal use made of codes to try to standardise the entries. This works fine for relatively simple deeds but can become a bit tortuous for more complex deeds. For the deeds that have been indexed, you can also link directly through to the FamilySearch image (buried as a small grey button at the bottom of the deed page.)
If you have some copies of deeds yourself, you can contribute to the project, albeit that the multiplicity of speadsheet templates that you are encouraged to download from the website are rather overwrought in my opinion.
However, having said all that, this project is a labour of love for the contributors involved and in the absence of any other form of online index for these records, we should be very grateful for their generosity in freely sharing their ongoing efforts. It is also worth making a note to check back regularly to see what might have been added for your names or places of interest.
Wills
There were also some wills registered too, so time to raise your glass to Beryl Eustace who made it her mission to produce an index to those registered up to 1832 in 3 volumes. You can search and browse Volumes 1 and 2 on Ancestry via the Registry of Deeds, Dublin - Abstract of Wills (Anc=£)
collection if you have a subscription.
Else you can find all 3 volumes for free well hidden on the Irish Manuscripts Commission digitised out of print publications (where you may find other treasure!) These are PDF documents that you will need to download to search.
I do recommend that you take a moment to read her excellent Introduction as this will help manage your expectations as to what was actually recorded. Each volume has a helpful Index of Names and Index of Placenames towards the back, so best to head for those by entering a suitably high image number and leafing back or forwards to get to the start of each, remembering that image numbers don't necessarily correspond with the page numbers that are printed on the scanned pages!
Names in bold in the Index of Names are those for whom a will was registered. Other names are those of people who were named in registered wills in different roles e.g. benefactors, witnesses etc. The Index of Placenames helpfully lists the county after the place name. Now pay attention - the number listed after each name is the number of the abstract not the page number! Usually 2 or more abstracts appeared on each page, so you will have to take a guess as to where in the volume the abstract appears and again, leaf back or forwards to find the entry. The zoom facility is a bit of pain to use - be prepared for pages floating about on the screen and it not being very obvious how to toggle between the zoomed image and the double page layout - keep clicking and hopefully it will resolve itself but my advice is grit your teeth and be patient!
Once you have found an abstract, note the set of 3 numbers that appear to the bottom left at the end. These represent the book number, page number and memorial number which you can then use to look up the copy of the deed.
There were also some wills registered too, so time to raise your glass to Beryl Eustace who made it her mission to produce an index to those registered up to 1832 in 3 volumes. You can search and browse Volumes 1 and 2 on Ancestry via the Registry of Deeds, Dublin - Abstract of Wills (Anc=£)
collection if you have a subscription.
Else you can find all 3 volumes for free well hidden on the Irish Manuscripts Commission digitised out of print publications (where you may find other treasure!) These are PDF documents that you will need to download to search.
- Registry of Deeds Dublin Abstract of Wills Vol. 1, 1708-1745
- Registry of Deeds Dublin Abstract of Wills Vol. 2, 1746-1785
- Registry of Deeds Dublin Abstract of Wills Vol. 3, 1785-1831
I do recommend that you take a moment to read her excellent Introduction as this will help manage your expectations as to what was actually recorded. Each volume has a helpful Index of Names and Index of Placenames towards the back, so best to head for those by entering a suitably high image number and leafing back or forwards to get to the start of each, remembering that image numbers don't necessarily correspond with the page numbers that are printed on the scanned pages!
Names in bold in the Index of Names are those for whom a will was registered. Other names are those of people who were named in registered wills in different roles e.g. benefactors, witnesses etc. The Index of Placenames helpfully lists the county after the place name. Now pay attention - the number listed after each name is the number of the abstract not the page number! Usually 2 or more abstracts appeared on each page, so you will have to take a guess as to where in the volume the abstract appears and again, leaf back or forwards to find the entry. The zoom facility is a bit of pain to use - be prepared for pages floating about on the screen and it not being very obvious how to toggle between the zoomed image and the double page layout - keep clicking and hopefully it will resolve itself but my advice is grit your teeth and be patient!
Once you have found an abstract, note the set of 3 numbers that appear to the bottom left at the end. These represent the book number, page number and memorial number which you can then use to look up the copy of the deed.
Read On ... The Registry of Deeds - Finding Deeds
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2022
