NLI Catholic Church Records (Drumcree Church)

[mackers]

Trying to find out about the NLI on line Birth records for 1845 Drumcree Parish Catholic births and discovered many blank spaces for a fair bit of that year. Wondering if anyone else has fell foul of this situation? Does anyone know if it had to do with the Famine starting around that time? Or just a mishap while being copied?

[Elwyn Soutter]

Personally I’d say it was simply  a matter of a negligent priest who failed to enter the relevant records at the time. I have seen it elsewhere. Sometimes the priest remembers some of the details eg father’s name but not the child’s and relevant gaps are left. Probably intended to fill them in later but never did.

I can’t see any obvious link to the famine (which in any case really only got bad in 1846).  Children were still being born all through the 1840s, so that’s not going to explain them being missing from the baptism records.

[mackers]

Personally I’d say it was simply  a matter of a negligent priest who failed to enter the relevant records at the time. I have seen it elsewhere. Sometimes the priest remembers some of the details eg father’s name but not the child’s and relevant gaps are left. Probably intended to fill them in later but never did.

I can’t see any obvious link to the famine (which in any case really only got bad in 1846).  Children were still being born all through the 1840s, so that’s not going to explain them being missing from the baptism records.

Thanks for that but on the face of it and to be fair to them it other than that space of time the same priest was very detailed apart from parts of that time. Plus it also recorded the money aspect of the births for the record. Also it is only that year that ever was sketchy.
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[Elwyn Soutter]

OK. But it's inconceivable that 3 or 4 months went by without a birth in the parish. Other nearby parishes kept reliable and full records during that period.

[mackers]

OK. But it's inconceivable that 3 or 4 months went by without a birth in the parish. Other nearby parishes kept reliable and full records during that period.

Exactly. Bit of a mystery.
In addition it seems that there were 2 or3 different R.C. churches in Drumcree Parish not to mention that in some cases records are deemed to be in Armagh and Lurgan and a bit of Antrim  to boot? As on Irish Genealogy site.

[Sinann]

Looking at the register
https://registers.nli.ie/registers/vtls000632568?locale=en#page/8/mode/1up
It does look like there simply weren’t any babies to baptise, could there have been something in 1844 that took men out of the area for a few months, maybe to work in Scotland, or in a nearby city.

Or is it the usual faded sections, bit too uniform for that but it’s hard to tell if writing is showing through from the page before or not.

[Elwyn Soutter]

Population of the civil parish of Drumcree in 1851 was 14,038 of whom 11,716 lived in rural areas and the remainder in Portadown. There were 2237 inhabited houses in the parish.

https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/statistics/archive/census1851/THE_CENSUS_OF_IRELAND_1851_-_Armagh.pdf

So perhaps 5000 adult men would have to have left or gone missing in 1844 for there to be almost no births in 1845. If that had happened I feel fairly sure it would have made it into the history books.

Were there similar gaps in the Church of Ireland and Presbyterian records for 1845? (I don't know but I'd be surprised if there were).

[aghadowey]

It may be that the priest had recorded some baptisms performed where there seem to be gaps but the record was damaged and these remaining bits are all that he was able to reconstruct later.

[Sinann]

The more I look at it I think it just faded areas, pity he didn’t add up the money at the end of each month.

https://registers.nli.ie/registers/vtls000632568?locale=en#page/10/mode/1up
September just stops but there is a gap before October that makes no sense unless there is writing there we can’t see.