Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Free Access to Irish Records on MyHeritage
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, MyHeritage is offering free access to all Irish historical records on the platform for a limited time.
Millions of people around the world — especially in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia — have Irish roots. Whether your ancestors lived in Ireland for generations or emigrated during one of the great waves of migration, historical records can help uncover the details of their lives.
Over the past year, MyHeritage has greatly expanded its Irish collections, adding tens of millions of new records. Today, users can explore a wide range of Irish sources, including birth, marriage, and death records, parish registers, newspapers, passenger lists, and court records.
One of the most recent additions this year is the Ireland, Petty Sessions Court Registers, 1828–1926, a collection containing more than 23 million records. Petty Sessions courts handled minor civil and criminal cases across Ireland. The registers occasionally mention local political activists and community figures, offering insight into the social and political tensions of the time.
A record in this collection offers an interesting glimpse of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) before he became one of the most influential political figures in Irish history. Parnell was an Irish nationalist leader who headed the Irish Parliamentary Party and played a central role in the movement for Home Rule, which sought self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom. In the Petty Sessions register from August 8, 1867, a “Charles Parnell Esq.” of Avondale appears as the complainant in two cases heard in Rathdrum, County Wicklow, involving individuals accused of trespassing in his wood at Avondale.
This almost certainly refers to Parnell, whose family owned the nearby Avondale estate. He was about 21 at the time and had recently inherited the property after his father’s death. The case itself was minor — the defendants were fined just one penny plus costs — but it shows the kind of everyday disputes recorded in Petty Sessions registers. Entries like this are interesting because they sometimes capture well-known figures long before they became prominent.
With free access to Irish records available for a limited time, this is a great opportunity to search for relatives in parish registers, court records, passenger lists, newspapers, and other historical sources.
You may discover new details about your family — from where your ancestors lived and worked to the journeys that eventually brought later generations around the world.
