Tuesday, 21st July, saw the second lecture in the summer lecture series Your Ancestors and the Nation’s Archives, a joint collaboration  between AGI and the National Archives of Ireland (NAI).

Paul Gorry speaking at the National Archives about the Registry of Deeds

Past president of AGI Paul Gorry gave a talk entitled “Indeed, they are  my  ancestors: the Registry of Deeds”, which was attended by over 75  people,  at the NAI’s premises in Bishop Street, Dublin.

Over the course of an hour he spoke with great authority on a subject he  knows well, sharing the accumulated knowledge of more thirty-five years  of searching at the Registry of Deeds (ROD). He gave an overview of the  history of the ROD and how it works and how its records are arranged.  He explained leases, mortgages, conveyances, rent charges, wills,  marriage  settlements and Protestant Discoveries, explaining how each of  these  differing records might aid genealogical research.

He exploded the myth that only the wealthy are referred to in deeds, with particular reference to descriptions of properties in deeds often noting adjoining properties and the names of their occupiers of whatever class. With some hilarity he also queried the more recent habit of erroneously describing the tomes (extremely large volumes of transcripts of ROD memorials) as “tombstones”!

The audience at paul gorry’s lecture on the registry of deeds

He provided an extremely useful handout listing information about ROD records and indexes, online resources and websites and a list of articles and publications of interest to genealogists which deal with ROD from the perspective of family history and genealogical research.

The next lecture will be on Tuesday, 11th August when Margaret Jordan will give her lecture “DNA Today”.  Attendance at all lectures must be pre-booked with the National Archives. For more details see here.