Hi Scott,
It's wonderful to hear that you are looking to trace your Irish family roots, we certainly hope that we can help you!
The first thing to do is find as much of the paper trail as possible, with birth, marriage and death certificates for your parents, their parents and so on. This allows you to narrow down the different branches of the family.
It is especially important the further back you go. Before 1864 records were kept in the form of church and parish records; while some of these have regrettably been lost over the years, all the surviving records have been sorted into
county-based genealogical centres.
In 1864, civil registration was introduced in Ireland, which is when we started seeing the formal registration of births, marriages, adoptions, and deaths. These records have been kept at the
General Register Office of Ireland (GRO), to this day.
Have you managed to obtain some information so far?
Martin