Today I wanted to look at the largest databases on our website – those of our BMDs for Counties Antrim and Down. These cover not just civil birth and marriage records but also church baptism, marriage and burial records as well as cemetery records from Belfast City Council.

In total we currently have over 930,000 baptism/birth records, over 460,000 civil/church marriage records and over 230,000 burial records; dating from the 1660s to the 1990s. This is an on-going project and we do not yet have records from every church but we are always indexing and transcribing new records to add to our website.

For Counties Antrim and Down we have virtually all Roman Catholic baptisms and marriages pre-1900 (plus funeral records where they exist) and in some cases these registers now go up to 1930. We have a large number of Protestant (especially Church of Ireland) baptisms, marriages and burials as well as virtually all civil marriage records from 1845 to 1921 and civil birth records for much of Belfast.

While you do need to be a subscriber or Guild Member in order to view a transcription of the full record, you are able to search the databases for free, for example, using both full or partial names of the bride and groom (for marriages) or some or all the names of the parents (for baptisms) in order to narrow down the list of results.

In this example we have searched for baptism and birth records of a John Hunter whose mother was named Agnes and have five results which show the year of birth/baptism and the first name of the father.