Registry of Deeds
The Scope of the Records
The Registry was set up by the Irish Parliament in 1708 to assist in regularising the massive transfer of land ownership from the Catholic Anglo-Norman and Gaelic populations to the Protestant Anglo-Irish which had taken place over the preceding century.
As a result, only 20% of the population at that time was likely
to use the Registry. Additionally, the Registry did not become
widely used until 1750 or thereabouts. The usefulness of the
records again declines from the 1830s and 1850s as the information
is superseded by that in the Tithe Books and Griffith's Valuation.
The registration of deeds was not obligatory; the function of the Registry was simply to provide evidence of legal title in the event of a dispute. These two facts, the voluntary nature of registration and the general aim of copperfastening the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations, determine the nature of the records held by the Registry. The overwhelming majority deal with property-owning members of the Church of Ireland, and a disproportionate number of these relate to transactions which carried some risk of legal dispute. In other words, the deeds registered are generally of interest only for a minority of the population, and constitute only a fraction of the total number of property transactions carried out in the country.
The implications of these facts are worth spelling out in detail. Over the most useful period of the Registry's records, the non-Catholic population of Ireland constituted, at most, 20% of the total. A large proportion of these were dissenting Presbyterians largely concentrated in the north, and suffering restrictions on their property rights similar to, though not as severe as, those imposed on Catholics; very few deeds made by dissenting Protestants are registered. Of the remaining non-Catholics, the majority were small farmers, tradesmen or artisans, usually in a position of economic dependence on those with whom they might have property transactions, and thus in no position to dispute the terms of a deed. The records of the Registry therefore cover only a minority of the non-Catholic minority. There are exceptions, of course, - large landlords who made and registered great numbers of leases with their smaller tenants, marriage settlements between families of relatively modest means, the business transactions of the small Catholic merchant classes, the registration of the holdings of the few surviving Catholic landowners after the relaxation of the Penal Laws in the 1780s - but these remain very definitely exceptions. And for the vast bulk of the population, the Catholic tenant farmers, the possibility of a deed having been registered can almost certainly be discounted, since they owned nothing and had almost no legal rights to the property they rented.
With these limitations in mind, it should now be said that, for those who made and registered deeds, the records of the Registry can often provide superb information. The propensity to register deeds appears to have run in families, and a single document can name two or three generations, as well as leading back to a chain of related records which give a picture of the family's evolving fortunes and the network of its collateral relationships.
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