Genealogy & Family History

Our parish boundaries — like most Irish parishes — changed over time. The present Parish of Enniskeane & Desertserges includes households that at varying times were in Kinneigh Parish, Desertserges Parish, Ballymoney Parish and Enniskeane Parish.

The earliest records of sacraments celebrated in the area date from the early 1800s. Some of these were in Desertserges and some in Kinneigh and Enniskeane. These registers only record Baptisms, Confirmations and Marriages. We have no death or burial records from the 1800s. Due to the fragile state of the valuable registers, they are not available for personal inspection or browsing.

  • All the sacramental records we have for the 1800s are digitised and can be accessed free of charge at the irishgenealogy website. (Use Enniskeane as the parish name in this search.)
  • All these records were also microfilmed by the National Library of Ireland and these films can now be viewed on-line free of charge at http://registers.nli.ie/

If you find a record on that site for which you wish to have a printed and certified Parish Certificate of Baptism, Confirmation or Marriage, you may order one for a small fee here and it will be posted to you by the Parish Office.

Please note that our parish does not have the time or resources to act as a professional genealogical service. We regret that we cannot facilitate personal callers with family history requests. However, if you have good information about a particular person whom you believe was baptised in our parish, we will conduct a careful search of the original register(s) if you supply the details and provide a €15 non-refundable fee here. This will be done as early as possible but may be subject to time constraints in the office.

Please note:

  1. If a record is not included in the above websites, it is likely that it is not in our parish registers or that it is illegible.
  2. Some of the registers are very difficult to read and some may be only partial records.
  3. There are multiple ways of spelling and writing most Irish surnames and Christian names (when doing an on-line search, you need to search for variations of the names, too.).