Discover death and in memoriam notices sourced from our large library of Irish newspapers. Learn in vivid detail how your Irish ancestors remembered those that they had lost and add vital genealogical information to your family tree.
Discover death and in memoriam notices sourced from our large library of Irish newspapers. Learn in vivid detail how your Irish ancestors remembered those that they had lost and add vital genealogical information to your family tree.
Each record consists of a transcript and original image of the newspaper page where the death or in memoriam notice was published. Death notices were typically printed soon after the individual passed away and contained details about the deceased’s age, address and occupation. Death notices may also feature information about the deceased’s family, such as their parents or spouse.
You may notice that Irish death notices in newspapers vary from their British counterparts. Signalling a difference in traditions following a bereavement, Irish death notices will often contain details of when the departed relative would be taken from their home for burial. This means that you can find details of an ancestor’s internment, like their burial place and time, and even information about their wake.
In memoriam notices are different to death notices. These were often published on a significant anniversary of a person’s death. In memoriam notices are generally more personal and may contain embellishments like poetry or a pertinent quote. They might be penned in the first person and provide insight into the lives of those the deceased left behind. They may also feature such expressions as ‘you are never out of my thoughts’ and ‘never forgotten’ to commemorate the loss of a loved one. Meanwhile, in memoriam notices also contain vital information, like the date of the deceased’s death and where they lived.
As time went by, families began to submit more personal death notices, mirroring the emotions expressed by in memoriam notices. You may find such moving sentiments as ‘a mother in a million’ and ‘God bless, darling’ in death notices printed in the late nineteenth century onwards.
The amount of information included in every death and in memoriam notice will vary, but you will be able to uncover a combination of the following:
You can also find the following information about the publication in which the death or in memoriam notice appeared:
These death and in memoriam notices have been sourced from our rich collection of Irish newspapers and span the 19th and 20th centuries. The death and in memoriam notices come from newspapers across Ireland. Following the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1921, these records cover both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Notices of deaths, births and marriages, as well as in memoriam notices, are an incredibly useful tool for researching your Irish family history. Following the destruction of the Four Courts on 30 June 1922, many public records were lost, and so newspaper notices can help replace these missing records. Such newspaper notices even predate official record keeping in Ireland, which did not begin until 1864.
From the 1820s onwards notices of deaths, births and marriages began to appear more regularly in Irish newspapers. Readers were encouraged to submit notices of family events for a fee, the length and detail of the notices often being impacted by such a cost. This economic factor also means that not all of the population would have been able to afford the insertion of their important life events into the press.
However, you will find that many newspapers often devoted multiple columns to their notices of births, marriages and deaths. They appeared as a recurring feature in daily and weekly publications, and their popularity endures even today.
Some deaths were announced without the inclusion of a first name, instead only using an initial. Try searching by surname and the year of death to find such records. Meanwhile, married women sometimes had their deaths announced using the names of their husbands. Entries announcing the death of ‘Mrs John Smith,’ or ‘the wife of Mr John Smith,’ are common, especially in earlier death notices. Therefore, it is worth searching for the name of a deceased woman’s spouse to uncover such death notices.
Death notices are filled with all sorts of abbreviations, from those to do with dates, such as ‘on the 5th inst.’ (short for ‘the 5th of this month’) and occupations, such as ‘Rev’ (short for ‘Reverend’). Others denote rank, like ‘Esq.’ (short for ‘Esquire’), which historically denoted a landed proprietor or country squire.
Death and in memoriam notices may come from further afield than Ireland. Families would often publish notices about family members who had emigrated to the likes of Australia and America. If you have ancestors with Irish roots, who perhaps emigrated from Ireland, you may find the notices of their deaths in this collection.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that the place of publication of the newspaper may be different from where the event happened. For example, the news of the death of William Arthur Jenkins on 7 October 1873 in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of just 20, was reported on by a Belfast newspaper. You can search by the location where an event happened via our place search field, or you can filter your search by newspaper title.