Other potential sources of information useful to the family historian researching ancestors in Northern Ireland include:

• Trades and Professions
• Street Directories
• Gravestone Inscriptions
• Newspapers
• School Records

Trades and Professions

The range of trades and professions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was far less than it is now, particularly in Ireland where there was very little industrialisation. If the ancestor was a tradesman or in business, a commercial directory for the area (see below) may be a useful source of information. Many of the directories listed various professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers, clergy and public officials.

Local public officials are also often listed in the reports and in minute books of county and borough councils.

For ancestors known to have practised law there is a body of records related to proving their suitability for that vocation to the Society of King’s Inns.

There are specific directories available for some professions. A list is available here.

Street Directories

Street directories are an excellent source of genealogical material. Copies are in short supply but most can be found in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland or in the larger reference libraries. A chronological list is available here.

Gravestone Inscriptions

Gravestone inscriptions can be a very useful source of information, in many cases indicating relationships and giving ages and birthdates of those interred. In some counties they have been extensively researched while in others they are virtually unresearched.

The Ulster Historical Foundation has a project called History from Headstones which aims to promote an interest in local burial grounds and their use in exploring the past. The Foundation has the largest collection of gravestone inscriptions in Northern Ireland with recordings in each of the six counties. The listings are more comprehensive for Antrim, Armagh, Down and Fermanagh with over 60,000 gravestone inscriptions having been digitised so far as part of the project. To access the database click here.

Newspapers

The earliest newspaper in Northern Ireland was the Belfast Newsletter published in 1737. The number of newspapers increased during the eighteenth century and by the nineteenth century most large towns had at least one newspaper and some towns had several. By 1900 Belfast had some forty published newspapers. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Library Association have jointly produced a booklet, Northern Ireland Newspapers: Checklist with Locations which covers papers from 1737 to the present day. All the known papers, past and present, are listed alphabetically, with a guide to where the various issues are held. Except in the case of a few indexed papers, it is very difficult to locate relevant items, as often the exact date of the event is unknown. The Linenhall Library has an excellent run of the Belfast Newsletter which is indexed, although unfortunately it is not arranged alphabetically.

Announcements of births, marriages and deaths are the most obvious items of interest but these primarily occur only after the mid eighteenth century and they usually only relate to the middle and upper classes. The birth notices tend to be less valuable since the name of the child and even the mother is usually not given. On the other hand marriage announcements can be very valuable, although they are often difficult to find as they are scattered throughout the newspaper where space allowed. The majority of marriage announcements will give the name of the bride’s father and his address, but even in the early nineteenth century only an exceptional item will provide the name of the bridegroom’s father, and this generally only for a person of considerable means. There was little religious discrimination and the newspapers contained Catholic marriages belonging to the merchant and gentry classes. As a result, the papers are one of the best ways of tracing the Catholic professional and middle classes as they emerged from the obscurity of the Penal Laws of the 1770s and 1780s. The parties’ religion is not usually mentioned but it is rare for a Catholic marriage notice to specify the location of the wedding (usually a private house), whereas it is commonplace for a Protestant notice to do so. Death notices are, by far, the largest in volume of the three types of announcement and also the one that covers the widest range of social classes. Until the second half of the nineteenth century the burial place of the deceased was hardly ever mentioned, the object of the obituary notice being to notify the public of the death, not, as became the fashion later, to summon them to the funeral. The death notices can, on occasion, provide useful information on other members of the family.

In the early newspapers advertisements can be an important source of genealogical information as businesses generally were privately owned by the individuals who ran them and the advertisements can yield information about the owners. Court notices can sometimes provide useful information but actual mention of persons in news items is generally minimal.

School Records

School records are another useful substitute for the lack of nineteenth century census returns. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were numerous schools but many were in poor condition and badly managed. In 1821 there were 3449 schools within the Province of Ulster. A national school system was introduced in the early 1830s and between 1832 and 1870 around 2500 national schools were established, built with the aid of the Commissioners of National Education and local trustees.

The best location for school records is the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. In its custody PRONI has some records which pre-date the national school system but of particular interest to the family historian are the registers of about 1500 national and public elementary schools which generally date from the 1860s. They record the full name of the pupil, the date of birth or age on entry, religion, father’s address and occupation, details of attendance and academic progress and the name of school previously attended. Some also indicate where the child went to work afterwards and whether he/she emigrated. Some of the registers have an index at the beginning which aids searching.

Telephone Directories

Telephone directories can be useful when researching surnames. Current online directories can be found at British Telecom and ukphonebook.com. British Telecom also maintains archives of old telephone directories. The first telephone directory which they have for Northern Ireland is dated July 1896 and they have all the directories until July 1911. There is a gap until April 1920 and thereafter they have a near complete collection up to the present day.

Maps

Maps can be used to find the exact location of an ancestor’s house, farm, etc. Initially maps were produced by landowners to aid estate management and some of these maps have accompanying lists of tenants and holdings with acreage and rent. In the early nineteenth century the government decided that, to implement a new land tax, it was necessary to map the country and by 1842 townland maps at a scale of 6 inches to one statute mile were completed. Fortunately this occurred at the time when the population was at its highest prior to the Great Famine. Copies of these maps can be found in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (OS/1). These maps have been revised and added to over the years and are available in PRONI.

Belfast Central Library also has a collection of maps which can provide a useful context of where our ancestors lived.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs (1830-40) are a useful information source. These are descriptions of parishes which accompanied the first Ordnance Survey maps of the north of Ireland and record details of landscape, buildings, and antiquities, land holdings, populations and employment. They have been published by the Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast.