Brown's in Armagh

Thank you for the reply

I assume that the marriage was in the Church of Ireland. The records haven?t all been centralised (though some early records were sent to Dublin for safekeeping in the 1880s and were subsequently lost in a fire). A copy of the Armagh church records still exists and is held by PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast. You could contact them and ask them if they will send you a copy of the marriage entry in the church register. Their records cover the following years:

C.I. Armagh (Armagh diocese) Baptisms, 1750-58 and 1775-1871; marriages, 1750-58 and 1776-1845; burials, 1750-58, 1770-75 and 1804- 71, with gaps; confirmations, 1824-70.

The originals may still be held by the church. So again you could write to the church. Or you could get a researcher to look the records up. In all 3 options there is likely to be a fee involved. Here?s a link to the PRONI website:

http://www.proni.gov.uk/index/research_and_records_held/can_someone_else_do_research_for_me.htm

If you intend writing to the church, here?s their website:

http://ireland.anglican.org/information/dioceses/60

Marriage records from the 1820s vary in the amount of information they hold. It will normally have the couples names and their two witnesses. It might have the couples parishes (for the Church of Ireland, one party at least had to reside within the parish where the marriage took place). It might have their townlands (addresses) but often not. And it might have their fathers names. But not always.

Tradition was to marry in the bride?s church, so that?s where you might expect to find her baptism and that of her siblings. However if the husband was of a different denomination or from a different parish, then the couple?s own children may be baptised at his church, rather than the one where they married. However you could still look for them in Armagh on the offchance that it was both parties church.

If in fact they lived in Shankill parish, then you?ll need to search there too. The following records exist at PRONI:

C.I. Shankill (Christ Church) (Dromore diocese) Baptisms, 1681-1872; marriages, 1676-1845; burials, 1675-1857 and 1866-77; vestry minutes, 1672-1960.

The Church of Ireland and the RC church have divided the country into a series of administrative areas, each headed by a bishop, and subdivided into parishes. So there?s a parish of Armagh and nearby another of Shankill, each with its own Minister/ Priest. All of the parishes in that area fall within the archdiocese of Armagh, headed by a bishop and in fact an Archbishop since Armagh is the religious capital of Ireland.

Church boundaries (a religious matter) don?t necessarily match county boundaries (which are for civil administrative purposes) and for example Shankill straddles counties Armagh & Down.