Michael Leader Parish Register Transcripts

The late Michael Leader was a former Vice-President of the Irish Genealogical Research Society who worked tirelessly for decades transcribing Church of Ireland parish records for County Cork.

The Parish Register Transcripts consist of 145 datasets, ranging from a single entry or page to hundreds of pages for a large parish. The total number of pages is nearly 7000. Almost all are for Church of Ireland records from County Cork. Occasionally there are strays outside County Cork as, for example, when a diocesan boundary extends into another county.

A complete list of the parishes transcribed, including date ranges, can be found here

The transcriptions were mostly from locally held parish registers, but occasionally from transcripts held by the then Public Record Office in Dublin, now the National Archives. Many are transcriptions of selected surnames only and not a complete transcription of the whole register. Michael’s interest lay in the families connected to his family and this is reflected in the transcriptions he made. His primary purpose was personal research, not complete transcriptions of available registers, although some of them exist. There has been an attempt to identify the registers for which selections only have been extracted. Many transcriptions are labelled as ‘selected surnames only’ but others without a label seem to have a narrow surname focus. These have been recorded as selected even though not labelled as such.

Comparison of events and dates with the current Church of Ireland registers held by the Representative Church Body (RCB) Library of the Church of Ireland in Dublin indicates that close to half of the Church of Ireland transcriptions contain some material not held by the RCB Library.

A number of monumental inscriptions for selected surnames only are included since they were gathered at the same time as the transcriptions and were kept in the same folders. Ten non-conformist transcriptions are also included, again for County Cork.

For a list of parishes that are now searchable, click here. There are 18 different parishes, amounting to more than 1500 pages, a little more than a fifth of the total transcripts. More parishes will be launched in the next few months.

Members can Search the database from here. You will be directed to the IGRS website login page unless you have logged in already, in which case you will land on the search page itself.

Each dataset is prefaced by a title page outlining the details of the parish or congregation concerned and the specific events and dates for the transcriptions and information about the parish church. There is a drop down menu listing the parishes available - select one and then search the name you are looking for.

It is well known that Michael Leader and Rosemary ffolliott were collaborators on these transcriptions. Rosemary’s work has been published on FindMyPast. Before this publication, a careful separation of transcriptions made sure that they did not overlap even where some material from the same parish was left with the Leader dataset and some material with the ffolliot/FindMyPast records. In these cases, the title page of the Leader dataset includes a note that there are additional materials on FindMyPast.

For more information about Michael Leader and his work visit the Library Holdings page