Parish Search for John Kane

Annemarie,

Thank you for taking the time to help me try to find information on my great-great-grandfather John Kane.  Your answer still leaves me with a few more questions.

1) I have found birth years to not always be correct in our family information.  Would any of the above John Kane records show a birth date of Sept. 15?

2) Since I don't have the correct spelling of his last name, would there be any baptism records for a John O'Cahan?

3) Would County Down have any additional records for Belfast?  Should I contact County Down.?

I'm sorry I don't have any additional information on his parents names.  Again thank you for taking the time to do this research.

Rico

Annemarie,

Is it possible to identify the parish's for the John Kanes you have listed in your original email?

Thank you

Rick Kane

Annemarie,

Since my last email I have found the marriage record for a John Kane and Mary Mcloughlin.  They were married 13/06/1811 at St Patrick's Belfast Roman Catholic Church.  I have also found the baptism for John Kane 25/02/1815 which was also at St Patrick's Church.  

I cannot find the John Kane baptism record you have found for 1814.

My question now is do baptism records list a date of birth and might it have been common to have a baptism a year or two after birth?

Thank you again for your help.

Richard

Richard,

Not sure if Annemarie is still monitoring her e-mails as she didn?t respond to your earlier ones.

General practice for Roman Catholics in Ireland was to baptise within a short period of time of the birth (often a couple of days). The theological reasoning is/was that the child could be left in limbo if it died before baptism. So you can normally rely on an RC baptism date being very close to the birth date. Some registers record both dates, some don?t. In general, the further back you go the less likely you are to get the birth date.

According to the PRONI website, the following records survive for St Pat?s. Note that the records for 1812 are missing. Thus if your original date of birth of 15^th Sept 1812 is/was correct, then the records are lost. However I sense that you may have found that it was actually in 1815, in which case the records do exist. There?s a copy of the original registers held in PRONI, the public record office in Belfast as well as the National Library in Dublin.

Baptisms, 1798-1811, 1814-67 and 1875-80; marriages, 1798-1812 and 1814-67.

You asked earlier about whether to check Co Down records. Though part of Belfast is in Co Down, most collections of church records for the city are held under the heading of Belfast which in turn they place in Co Antrim because most of the city is in that county.

Elwyn