Notes on Our Genealogy

In the 1850s my third-great-grandparents Patrick Quaid and Ellen Dundon lived in rural County Limerick. They lived in a townland called Ballymacamore, which was in a parish whose church was sometimes in Croagh and at other times in Kilfinny; it was a single parish but the central church moved over time . Since baptisms and marriages were recorded at the parish level, Croagh/Kilfinny is where events from Ballymacamore should be found. The old church ruins in Kilfinny, much older than any surviving records. Scans of Catholic parish registers are freely available at the National Library of Ireland site. Ancestry has indexes of the registers, but given the quality of the scans it's not clear how complete they might be. Perhaps more importantly, they don't always include ancillary information like the names of baptism sponsors and the more specific home of parents. That's important for me, because although I know Patrick & Ellen lived near several other families of Quaids,