PEOPLE LOOKING TO delve into their family’s history will be able to access new Irish records online from today.

Employment Affairs and Social Protection Minister, Regina Doherty, TD, and Josepha Madigan, TD, Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht have announced that a further tranche of Ireland’s historical Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths are now available online and free for the public to access.

These records hold the births for 1917 and 1918, marriages from 1864 to 1869, 1942 and 1943 and deaths for 1967 and 1968.

The release is part of an initiative by both departments to provide online access to historical records and registers compiled by the Civil Registration Service.

The records – which were prepared by the Civil Registration Service and uploaded by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht – can be accessed on the website www.irishgenealogy.ie.

The full range of records now available online are:

Birth records from 1864 to 1918

Marriage records from 1864 to 1943

Death records from 1878 to 1968

There is no charge for accessing the records.

Minister Doherty commented:

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“The growth in interest in family histories – helped by programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are and the possibility of digital archiving – has been facilitated by greater and easier online access and today represents another positive development for all genealogical detectives.”

Minister Madigan added: “Since this online service became available in 2016, over 2.1 million visitors to the website have viewed these records. For many people the big question then was when further images would be added to the website.”

The General Register Office is currently working on updating further records of marriages dating back to 1845 and deaths dating back to 1864. These will be available “in due course”, said the ministers. In the meantime, however, the indexes to these particular records are currently available on www.irishgenealogy.ie.

The latest tranche of records include some well known names – like the registered birth of Josef Locke, the acclaimed tenor, born Joseph McLaughlin, in March 1917; the death of the novelist Walter Macken who passed away on 22 April 1967, and the death of poet Patrick Kavanagh.