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Confused by Townlands, Parishes, Baronies and Districts? Hopefully the following may help. Adapted from: http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/guide/land-div.html I also recommend visiting Murray Lynn's site at http://ireland.kiwicelts.com/irishMap/ireMap.html In order to do Irish research accurately, there is a great need to understand the divisions where the person you are searching actually lived. A lot of people refer to their home as a town when it may actually be referring to a parish or maybe even a townland. This can be very confusing if not understood and may add a lot of unnecessary frustration on the part of the researcher. The first thing to do is to locate the parish that the townland is in. You can do this by consulting a listing of parishes, cities, towns and place names to determine which parish, and what county the ancestor lived in. One importance reference book is the Index to Irish Townlands, Parishes, and Baronies which lists the townlands and gives a number of parishes, counties and baronies. This book may be located at most genealogical libraries and can be searched online at the Archives of the Ordnance Survey
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| PROVINCE | There are four provinces: Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught. Provinces are the largest division and generally reflect the ancient Irish kingdoms. These correspond with the ancient territories controlled by four major Irish families: O'Neill in Ulster, O'Brien in Munster, O'Connor in Connaught, and MacMurrough in Leinster. | The province's highest point, Slieve Donard (848 metres), stands in County Down. The county town is Downpatrick, and the largest town is Bangor. Down contains both the southernmost point in Northern Ireland (Cranfield Point) and the easternmost point on the island of Ireland (Burr Point). | |
COUNTY | The county is the principal unit of local government. There are twenty-six in the Republic of Ireland and six counties in Northern Ireland, for a total of 32 counties. |
The Old Inn in Crawfordsburn is one of Ireland's oldest hostelries, with records dating back to 1614. The inn claims that people who have stayed there include Jonathan Swift, Dick Turpin, Peter the Great, Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, former US president George Bush, and C. S. Lewis, who honeymooned there. | |
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BARONY | A Barony is a county subdivision. It is thought to be a Norman division although it's precise origin is unknown. They are also believed to have been established during the government land surveys in the seventeenth century. This is now an obsolete division. It was widely used in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. There were 331 of these, each ruled by a baron, but the boundaries tended to reflect the holdings of the major Irish clans. | |
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| POOR LAW UNION | In 1838, the Poor Relief Act was put into effect and Ireland was divided into regions or "unions" in which the inhabitants were to be held financially responsible for the paupers in their region. In other words the tax payers paid for the poor. These unions had boundaries that overlapped county boundaries and were usually centered around a large market town. Initially there were 130 and eventually by 1850, there were 163 poor law unions. Between 1838 and 1852, there were 163 workhouses built throughout the country, each at the center of the union. The workhouses were normally situated in the large market town, and the Poor Law Union comprised the town and it's catchment area, with the result that the Unions in many cases ignored the existing boundaries of parish and county. The workhouse in the town provided relief for the unemployed and destitute, generally under very harsh conditions. Records were kept of the inhabitants. These can provide useful research material. In 1898, the Local Government Act adopted the Poor Law Unions as the basic administrative unit in place of the civil parishes or baronies. The unions were subdivided into 829 Registration Districts and 3751 District Electoral Divisions. Townlands were arranged according to these divisions, with parishes and baronies being retained only to make comparisons with records gathered before 1898. http://www.wisc.edu/history/famine/plu.html
| The Poor Law was the system for the provision of social security in operation in England and the rest of the United Kingdom from the 16th century until the establishment of the Welfare State in the 20th century. It was made up of several Acts of Parliament and subsequent Amendments. The extreme longevity of the Poor Law meant that some of the generalisations made about it (for example, the use of workhouses) refer to only a part of its history.
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Superintendent Registrar District | Poor Law Unions became known as Superintendent Registrar's districts in order to record births, marriages, and deaths as a result of the 1863 Acts for the Registration of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. | ||||||||||||||||
CIVIL PARISH | This was used extensively in surveys from the seventeenth century, based on early medieval maonastic and early Christian church settlements in Ireland. By 1841 the population of Ireland had risen to 8,175,124 and this caused a further dividing of the parish boundaries. New parishes were created by dividing the older ones, thus causing townlands to appear in different parishes in the records. Map & List of all Civil Parishes in County Down http://www.ancestryireland.com/database.php?filename=map_down | ||||||||||||||||
ROMAN CATHOLIC "RC" PARISH | While the Established Church (Church of Ireland) used the Civil Parish as its unit of administration, the Roman Catholic Church, as a result of the Reformation of the 16th century, developed its own parish structure. There is a book that maps the Roman Catholic Parishes to the Civil Parishes so that one can locate a given townland in either structure. In government records, the Civil Parish is the one that is used. See: A TOPOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF IRELAND, by Samuel Lewis. Written in 1837. Reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Company in 1984. A bishop's diocese was comprised of parishes. Many parishes were villages with a church and a clergyman. Larger towns and cities would contain several parishes. Records of British baptisms, marriages and burials have been maintained by law since 1538. Not all chuches date back to this date and also not all clergymen kept accurate records. Most records were jumbled together and some were written in Latin. In 1732 all records were required to be written in English. During the 18th century the baptisms, marriages and burials were maintained in separate pages or registers. In the early years it was normal to only record the father's full name and that of his child for baptismal entries, therefore making it very difficult to search records. http://www.thecore.com/let_ros/L_R_maps_sm.html | Map & List of RC Parishes in County Down http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/county/down/dowrc.html
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| DIOCESE | Three ecclesiastical synods in the 12th century, imposed a diocesan structure of four provinces: Armagh, Cashel, Dublin, and Tuam. With each province headed by an Archbishop. Under them were 22 bishops, each in charge of a diocese. The boundaries of the diocese have remained constant and are used by both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. Diocese boundaries have no relation to county boundaries, however. In 1834, the four provinces were reduced to two: Armagh and Dublin. County Down is in the dioceses of Down and Dromore, with a small portion in that of Connor. (1862) | ||||||||||||||||
| PROBATE DISTRICT | In 1858 a principal registry and eleven district registries were established to prove wills and grant administrations. The boundaries of these districts were either baronies or counties. | ||||||||||||||||
| TOWNLANDS | The townland is the smallest unit of land used in Ireland and may vary in size from less than ten acres to several thousand acres.
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The name of the townland "TD" is appearing on many roadsigns.
Remember one road can cross several townlands. | |||||||||||||||
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