Researching your family history: Civil Registration, Births

Welcome to the sixth and final week in this series of researching your family history during lockdown. Last week in an attempt to find James McCormack’s birth certificate I looked at the church records for marriages in St. Mary, Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, October 1903. Using the website www.irishgenealogy.ie I discovered that the maiden name of James’s mother was Julia Corr. 

Armed with this information I once again accessed www.irishgenealogy.ie and went to Civil Registration, Births. I endeavoured to calculate his date of birth from the 1911 census and his death certificate. The census states that he was thirty in 1911 which would mean that he was born in approximately 1881.  His death certificate shows that he was forty when he died in 1916 which would put his date of birth at 1876.

 

I started my search by inputting his name, location and range of years. My search looked like this,

James, McCormack, Dublin, 1876-1881 and tick birth.

This search returned 7 results, because the year of birth was before 1900 I had to look at each image of the seven births searching for a James McCormack with a mother named Julia Corr. From 1900 the mother’s maiden name appears in the indexes which make identifying a birth easier. Having looked at all seven entries I found that none of them matched my criteria. I therefore decided to widen my search. I decided to go back two years i.e. 1974-1975 and re-entered my search.

James, McCormack, Dublin, 1874-1875 tick birth. 

This search returned 3 results. I was lucky that the first result was the birth certificate of James. He was born on 15 July 1874 at 5 Lurgan Street, Dublin, His father’s name was James McCormack, a barber and his mother’s name was Julia Corr. If we look back at the original Marriage certificate of James McCormack and Catherine Clarke in 1903 it states that the occupation of James’s father was a hairdresser which ties in with barber on the birth certificate. 

By finding the birth certificate of James McCormack we now know that at the time of his death in 1916 he was actually forty two years of age. This birth certificate gives some additional information, i.e. another address for the family. It also shows that James’s mother signed the register with an X, her mark, which shows that she could not write. 

In conclusion by using just one website, www.irishgenealogy.ie we have been able to find out a great deal of information about this family. There are many more clues that could be explored but that’s for another day.  Hope you enjoyed this six week series and feel ready to start researching your own family history.