The various past and present boundaries, addresses, divisions and subdivisions in Ireland were a nightmare on which I could not focus for years during my search for information on my ancestors. In a search for historical information on your historical family, you will come across many documents about a person, if you are lucky. All those documents will have different name variations depending on which document you are looking at – not to mention the fact that families tended to use the same names for successive generations.
So while finding people of the name you are searching for is very easy—there are hundreds, if not thousands—being sure which one is your ancestor is not so easy. Ancestrydotcom abounds with trees containing wrong information. I have given up contacting people who have my ancestors in their trees to alert them to the fact that they have the wrong ancestor. In my search, I have done my best to find corroborating documents to substantiate my findings.
Every clue and document you may find in your search could have a different address for the person you are researching. So it is important to understand which type of address is referred to and finding those places on maps can help narrow the field for you.
WHAT IS THE ADDRESS ON OLD DOCUMENTS, SUCH AS BIRTH CERTS?
These days, in Ireland, we have a house number, street name, town/village name, county, and eircode.
In the past, we had a civil parish, an ecclesiastical parish, a poor law union division, towns/villages, townlands, electoral divisions, and baronies. And few of the boundaries are the same, so all in all finding the exact locations of our ancestors is not that ea
Here follows the various definitions.
BARONY
A barony is a historical subdivision of a county. Baronies were established during the conquest of Ireland by the Tudor kings of England.
TOWNLAND
A townland is a small geographical division of land used in Ireland. The townland system is of Gaelic origin, pre-dating the Norman invasion, and most have names of Irish Gaelic origin. However, some townland names and boundaries come from Norman manors, plantation divisions, or later creations of the Ordnance Survey.
CIVIL PARISH
A civil parish was typically made up of 25–30 townlands. It may include urban areas such as villages. A parish may cross the boundaries of both baronies and counties; in some cases, it may be in several geographically separate parts. They were included in the 19th century maps of the Ordinance Survey of Ireland.
ECCLESIASTICAL PARISH
An 1871 report to the english parliament noted that there were three classes of parish in Ireland:
- the civil parish,
- the Church of Ireland parish and
- the Roman Catholic parish.
The first two generally, but not always, had the same boundaries, while the third generally did not. As a result of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had to adapt to a structure based on towns and villages, with parishes that were generally larger than the old parishes.
ELECTORAL DIVISIONS
Electoral Divisions were comprised of a number of townlands for administrative and electoral purposes.
POOR LAW UNIONS
In 1834 Ireland was divided into Poor Law Unions based on the Irish electoral divisions. The electoral divisions were made up of townlands. Each Union was obliged to provide a workhouse for their destitute poor. A Board of Guardians was elected in each union to administer the Poor Law.
The above definitions are from wikipedia.