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 transcriptions were mostly made in the 1950s and 1960s from locally held parish registers. Many are transcriptions of selected surnames only. Michael’s 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.
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. A complete list of the parishes transcribed, including date ranges, can be found here
Close to half of the Church of Ireland transcriptions contain some material not held by the Representative Church Body Library.
A number of monumental inscriptions for selected surnames only are included, as are ten non-conformist congregations in County Cork.
For a list of parishes that are now searchable, click here.
Members and others can Search the database. Members should log in before searching, others can go directly to the search page. Everyone will be able to see a table showing the number of results of the search. But only members will be able to open the pdf showing that page image.
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
