If you have Irish roots, today is your lucky day! Ancestry has posted an Index to Griffith’s Valuation, 1848-1864, and Tithe Applotment Books, 1824-1837 to its collection of Irish records.Â
Griffith’s Valuation, references approximately one million individuals who occupied property in Ireland between 1848 and 1864. The Griffith’s Valuation, or Primary Valuation of Ireland, was executed under the direction of Sir Richard Griffith to determine the amount of tax each person should pay towards the support of the poor within their poor law union. This involved determining the value of all privately held lands and buildings in rural as well as urban areas to figure the rate at which each unit of property could be rented year after year. The resulting survey was arranged by barony and civil parish with an index to the townlands appearing in each volume. The original volumes of the survey are held in the National Archives, Dublin and Public Record Office, Belfast.
Few other records can be used to identify an immigrant ancestor’s exact place of origin, and only Griffith’s Valuation links an individual to a specific townland and civil parish. This information is of extreme importance since the first step in Irish genealogical research is to identify an ancestor’s townland and civil parish. This information can lead you to ecclesiastical parish records of births and marriages.
Information listed in the index includes:
- Name
- County of residence
- Parish of residence
The Tithe Applotment Books record the results of a unique land survey taken to determine the amount of tax payable by landholders to the Church of Ireland, the established church until 1869. They are known as the Tithe Applotment Books because the results of this land survey were originally compiled in nearly 2,000 hand-written books.
The Tithe Applotment Books are not comprehensive and some parts of the country were not surveyed. Information from the Tithe Books has been extracted and the names have been indexed in this data set. Only the six counties that constitute present-day Northern Ireland – Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyrone, covering 223 parishes, are included. If you find an ancestor among the nearly 200,000 listed, you will learn the following:
- Name
- County
- Parish
- Townland
- Year of enumeration
Ancestry members can search these and several other Irish collections through this landing page.
Sounds like an awesome new reference. So far, I have only found birthplace as Ireland. No counties, cities, or parishes listed and all of my ‘elderly relatives’ are pretty much gone. I found some census records that I think are my GG Grandparents but the only person I had access to that would know passed away last May. My maternal grandfather, and Mom doesn’t know if I have the correct names of his paternal grandparents.