Explore birth notices sourced from our comprehensive collection of Irish newspapers. Fill in the gaps of your Irish family history and add new illuminating details to your family tree.
Explore birth notices sourced from our comprehensive collection of Irish newspapers. Fill in the gaps of your Irish family history and add new illuminating details to your family tree.
Each record consists of a transcript and original image of the newspaper page where the birth notice was published. Birth notices were submitted by the family of the new arrival, and often details the names of the parents and the place and date of birth of the child. The amount of information included will vary from birth notice to birth notice, but you will be able to uncover a combination of the following:
You can also find the following information about the publication in which the birth notice appeared:
These birth notices have been sourced from our rich collection of Irish newspapers and span the 19th and 20th centuries. The birth notices come from newspapers across Ireland. Following the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1921, these records cover both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Notices of births, marriages and deaths, as well as in memoriam notices, are an incredibly useful tool for researching your Irish family history. Following the destruction of the Four Courts on 30 June 1922, many public records were lost, and so newspaper notices can help replace these missing records. Such newspaper notices even predate official record keeping in Ireland, which did not begin until 1864.
From the 1820s onwards notices of births, marriages and deaths began to appear more regularly in Irish newspapers. Readers were encouraged to submit notices of family events for a fee, the length and detail of the notices often being impacted by such a cost. This economic factor also means that not all of the population would have been able to afford the insertion of their important life events into the press.
However, you will find that many newspapers often devoted multiple columns to their notices of births, marriages and deaths. They appeared as a recurring feature in daily and weekly publications, and their popularity endures even today.
Our Irish birth notices may not contain the name of the child who has been born, instead naming the parents, or sometimes, just the father. Phrasing such as ‘to the lady of Hugh Gavin, a daughter,’ or ‘the wife of Daniel Kinsella, a son,’ is common. This is especially true of our earlier birth notices. We recommend, therefore, to search by surname and year of birth, or by the father’s first and last names.
Birth notices may also come from further afield than Ireland. Families would often publish notices about family members who had emigrated to the likes of Australia and America. If you have ancestors with Irish roots, but who were not actually born in Ireland, you may find the notice of their birth in this collection.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that the place of publication of the newspaper may be different from where the event happened. For example, the news of the birth of a daughter to Patrick Maguire and his wife in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in 1877, appeared in a newspaper published in Belfast. You can search by the location where an event happened via our place search field or you can filter your search by newspaper title.