Griffith's Valuation

The Primary Valuation, better known as Griffith’s Valuation after the Commissioner of Valuation, Sir Richard Griffith, is one of the best known Irish genealogical sources, and is all the more important because of the loss of nearly all nineteenth-century census returns. It derived from the work of the Tenement Valuation and was produced in printed and easily accessible form between 1847 and 1864.

A total of 251 volumes were published for the whole of Ireland with the data issued initially by barony and from 1853 onwards exclusively by Poor Law Union. Within each printed volume, the information is organised by parish (or sometimes electoral division) and townland (or by street within towns and cities). Poor Law Unions often straddled county boundaries and in these instances there will usually be a separate volume for each county covered by the Poor Law Union. There is an index at the front of each volume which enables searchers to identify the page or pages in which a specific townland may be found.

Free online access to the Primary (Griffith’s) Valuation is available through the AskAboutIreland website. The website includes not only digital scans of the pages from the printed valuation books, but also Valuation maps overlaid on Google maps. Searches can be carried out by the name of the occupier and also by place-name, though there is limited flexibility in terms of spelling variations. With regard to the Valuation maps available on this website, researchers need to be aware that these are not contemporaneous with the printed Valuation, but were produced a decade and more later.