Identifying an Undocumented Source

I sent correspondence to a historical society in Ireland seeking information on a specific family. They sent me back some fascinating possibilities. One item was an abbreviated transcript of a 1786 lease agreement mentioning the person I was looking for. At that time, the ancestor was aged 12 and he was one of the “lives” mentioned for the duration of the lease agreement between this father and the grantor of the lease. The grantor was not mentioned in the abstract. However, there was no source cited, let alone a volume and page.

How to Backtrack a Source

You are sure to find situations like this all over the Internet as people plow through records, but don’t necessarily document them properly. In this case, I assumed the source was the Irish Registry of Deeds. The abstract did have a place name, so I looked at the “County Index” also called “Lands Index” for that locality around 1786.

The volumes around 1786 didn’t have the lease, so I expanded my search. The property and lease was mentioned in later transactions; one in 1805 and another in 1816. That was good enough for me as I was able to figure out the father had died prior to 1816 (there was an 1811 will for him in the indexes, no second copy survives).

The Irish Registry of Deeds Confirmed a Lease

I’m still on the lookout for the 1786 original lease, but for the moment, I’m quite happy the Registry of Deeds confirmed the abstract. There’s much more in the deed books and no doubt in the landlord papers for that geographic area. This was all a good day in Irish research!

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