The most common EU country where Brits have a citizenship claim is the Republic of Ireland, says Rosemary Collins from Who Do You Think You Are magazine.
For centuries, immigrants have come from Ireland to Britain in search of a better life, meaning that many Brits have Irish ancestry. And Ireland grants citizenship to anyone with an Irish-born grandparent.
So, how can you make an Irish citizenship through ancestry claim?
How to get an Irish passport and citizenship?
If you weren’t born in Ireland, you are entitled to Irish citizenship if one or both of your parents was born in Ireland and was entitled to Irish citizenship; if, at the time of your birth, one or both of your parents had become an Irish citizen by registering with the Foreign Births Register or by naturalisation; or if at least one of your grandparents was born in Ireland. This applies to grandparents born in both the modern-day Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
If you have an Irish-born grandparent, you will need to enter the grandparent and parent through whom you claim Irish citizenship on Ireland’s Foreign Births Register. A full explanation of the process and the documentation you need is available here. Note that Foreign Births Register applications take nine months to process and cost €278, or €153 for an application on behalf of a child.
For your Irish-born grandparent, you will need their original civil birth certificate, original marriage certificate or change of name document if applicable, and a certified photocopy of their current state-issued identification, or their death certificate if they’re deceased.
If you don’t have these documents, you can order copies of Irish civil birth, marriage and death certificates here. Civil registration of marriages in Ireland was first introduced in 1845, and civil registration of all births, marriages and deaths occurred from 1864. The indexes for civil birth records from 1864 to 1924, marriage records from 1845 to 1949 and death records from 1871 to 1974 are available for free on the website IrishGenealogy. If the birth, marriage or death fell within these years, it’s worth looking up the record on IrishGenealogy first and using the details to order the original certificate.
With family history research, the first step is always to work out what you do know. Talk to living family members about what they remember about your family, and write it down. Try to get a rough picture of when and where your grandparent might have been born. Remember that family stories can get distorted over the years, so don’t treat everything you hear as gospel.
If you can’t find the birth record at first, try searching for a wider parameter of birth years, or in the neighbouring registration district. You can also try using different spellings of your grandparent’s surname, or variations of their first name.
When you have found their birth record, you can trace their life forwards to find their marriage and death records. It is also useful to ‘keep track’ of them through the years by looking them up in censuses or other records. Unfortunately, tracing Irish family history is difficult because the Public Record Office of Ireland burned down in the Irish Civil War in 1922, destroying centuries of records, including the pre-1901 census records. However, the 1901 and 1911 censuses of Ireland survived and are available, and you can find out more about different forms of Irish family history records.
If you need more help tracing your Irish grandparent, you might consider hiring a professional genealogist to carry out the research, which you can do via Accredited Genealogists Ireland.