Find My Past Ireland - Search with the experts

Useful links for Courts and legal records

Court & legal records are a key source for tracing your Irish family history because they record a huge volume of  names from a plethora of cases. Plaintiffs, claimaints, prisoners, relatives, judges, witnesses and in many cases victims are named, with additonal information such as occupation, last known address and in some cases a physical description. These collections are compiled from the records housed in the National Archives of Ireland.

In our Prison registers section there are are 2.7 million records, with information on over 3.5 million people.

Our Petty Sessions order books contain details of over 1.2 million cases.

Searching the records:
All names appearing in our Courts & legal category can be searched for, also a specific time frame, court or prison. The "County" field refers to the county of the court or prison, which is not necessarily where those involved lived or were born.

Find out more about these records:

Irish Prison registers 1790-1924

Petty Session order books 1850-1910

Video tutorial for searching Courts and legal records: