William Canning

The birth is long before the start of statutory birth registration in Ireland (1864) and so you need to rely on church records to try and trace the birth. Some church records are on-line on rootsireland and the Ulster Historical Foundation sites but many are not, especially some protestant records. Do you know what denomination William was?

Note too that William Canning is a pretty common name. There’s 47 of them in the 1901 Irish census so you really need parents names from a marriage or death certificate to be sure of identifying the right one.

The most complete set of records for Belfast are held in PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast but that’s a bout 200 churches for Belfast so unless you can narrow the search by denomination it’s a large collection to go through.