Townland Indexes Timelines of LDS Registry of Deeds microfilms

Having spent some time using this resource at the National Archives at Kew, here are my tips on how to navigate the catalogue to get to the film numbers you will need and what to expect when you start reading through them.

What can you access at LDS Family History Centres?

As of April 2017, the LDS London Family History Centre announced that their stock of Registry of Deeds microfilms would be moved to the Society of Genealogists library in central London, with a nominal day pass payment required to access them. However, the really big development is that the LDS have released this collection to browse online for free!
There are over 2800 microfilm reels in all in the collection which you will find in their main catalogue under Transcripts of memorials of deeds, conveyances and wills, 1708-1929. All appear to have acquired the magical little camera symbol which, when clicked on, takes you to a gallery of all the pages scanned for that particular volume in sequential order. Yes, you will have to (patiently) hunt through the pages to find what you're looking for but still cheaper than a trip to Dublin and not as bad as having to sit hunched over a microfilm reader!

What should you look out for in the catalogue?

The following words of advice are based upon my own experiences of using a sub-set of the films and of trying to make sense of the catalogue - I certainly have not studied every film to be able to confirm my assumptions, so be sure to put me right if you have particular advice to give yourself.

Townland Indexes;

There are 534 films covering the period 1708 to 1929 which appear to have been filmed and catalogued mainly in batches given the runs of sequential film numbers assigned.
There may be one county per film or multiple counties on each film. There are some patterns of certain counties being put together alphabetically on films but you cannot always rely on this.
Some films appear to contain counties and/or county towns of the same name, but I must confess that I haven't checked these out completely.
Time periods follow patterns too, with blocks of 5 years per county being used especially from about 1835 onwards. However, this is not always the case with some overlapping filmings and several consistent gaps too.
There are also often multiple filmings of the same index ledgers, sometimes grouped into huge sets of up to 20 counties. These are probably multiple copies of the same physical film I imagine, but you never know, maybe a different copy may be a bit more legible where you are struggling to read an entry? Let me know!
There have obviously been different hands at work when devising the index entries as the descriptive style changes. This generally doesn't cause too many problems as the counties are usually spelled out and you can search within the catalogue page by county name using the Ctrl-F function. However, 3 things to look out for;
- Misspellings! I've found these for Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Limerick, Louth, Fermanagh, Monaghan and Roscommon at the last count, so it might be an idea to search on partial names for these counties.
- Ranges of counties. Some filmings crammed many counties on to the same film and may be described as "Antrim to Cork" for example, by which I assume that I would expect to find Antrim, Armagh, Carlow, Cavan, Clare and Cork therein. However, watch out for where they might have allocated Leix/Laois (Queens) and Offaly (Kings) as you will generally find them out of step alphabetically by their modern names.
- Image order on the film. I have obviously not been able to prove this with so many films to look at, but I imagine that the way in which the catalogue entry is worded ought to reflect the same order on the film so do not think you have chosen the wrong film when the first county page that comes up is not the one you initially hoped for - you may need to scroll through many images to get to the county you want. However, if you are looking at the film through the multi-page view that seems to be the default, you can recognise the start of a county by the almost blank pages that mark their start.
There are also catalogue entries for specific towns and cities in the indexes, most of which are the same name as the county of course! This appears to apply to the cities of Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny, Londonderry, Limerick and Waterford. Belfast appears separately from 1828, which is interesting as it was not created a city until 1888 by letters patent. Drogheda in Co. Louth also merits several mentions in the lists as it was an important county town on the border with Co. Meath. Collectively I believe that these places were also referred to as Corporation Towns and this is the catch-all title that might appear on certain film entries. However, the catalogue entry has a long list of 68 further town names that it labels Corporate Towns but does not name in the catalogue entries, so it may be that these towns also appear as separate pages of entries from time to time? I must confess, when I tried looking all these towns up I was a bit baffled by some which appeared to be mere villages appearing amongst some more familiar county towns? There were also several which could refer to 2 or more places in Ireland. I suspect that this might be a bit of curiously odd cataloguing by someone not entirely familiar with Irish geography, but if you have worked more extensively with these records than I, please tell me more!

Is there anything that can help you trace records chronologically by county?

There most certainly is, as I am very proud to announce my latest unique finding aid - Townland Indexes Timelines! I have attempted to wrangle all of those 534 catalogue entries into chronologically ordered spreadsheets, one for each county and one for each of the 8 catalogue-named "Corporation Towns", so pick your favourite county from the list below. And the big news is that as of June 2017, I have converted all of the film numbers into hyperlinks that should take you straight to the film viewer - Enjoy!

Please be a little patient when you first pull up these pages as the spreadsheet might take a few moments to load from the Cloud - the "waiting ..." message bottom left of the screen means something is happening, I promise you! However, occasionally there may be problems with the other server or connections and the spreadsheets will not appear - I'm sorry, not much I can do about that, but just try a little later and things have usually sorted themselves out.