Record Atlas
Donegal · Ireland · 0 volumes

Culdaff

Culdaff in Ireland, also written Cúil Dabhcha. 0 record volumes covering no dated years, and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-09-30 · first mapped 2026-09-23 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This is a civil parish, not a town — the marker sits at its centre, not at a building. Records filed at this level are usually held for the whole civil parish.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Culdaff. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Search both names, not one

    This place has been written down as Culdaff, Cúil Dabhcha. A catalogue indexed under the old name will not answer to the new one, and most people never find out they were searching the wrong word.

    Do this: search each name separately on every site below. Write the list down; you will need it every time.

  2. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1534–1801 Kingdom of Ireland, under the English crown nai-ie · proni · familysearch
    1801–1864 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland nli-registers · nai-ie · proni · familysearch · findmypast
    1864–1922 United Kingdom — civil registration irishgenealogy · nai-ie · proni · familysearch
    1922–2026 Irish Free State and Republic in the south; Northern Ireland in the six counties irishgenealogy · nai-ie · proni · findmypast

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  3. The things that catch people out here

    1922–2026, Irish Free State and Republic in the south; Northern Ireland in the six counties. THE TRAP. On 30 June 1922 the Public Record Office in the Four Courts burned with almost every Irish census before 1901, most Church of Ireland registers deposited there, and the wills. Researchers are still told to «look for the census» — there is no census to look for. What survives is what was never sent in: the Catholic parish registers, PRONI's copies in the north, Griffith's Valuation, and the Tithe Applotment books. Start there, not with the census.

  4. Find the parish, because that is where the book was

    Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the register. A village without its own church was written into a neighbour's book.

    • Clonca Church & Cross
    • St Mary's Church
    • Glacknadrummond Methodist Church
    • St Buadan's Church of Ireland

  5. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

The archives named above: nai-ie · proni · familysearch · nli-registers · findmypast · irishgenealogy. What each one holds and why.

Also written

Cúil Dabhcha

If the document in your hand says one of these, this is the place it means.

Whose archive this ground was

Culdaff sits in Ireland — the whole island. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1534–1801 Kingdom of Ireland, under the English crown National Archives of Ireland · PRONI — Public Record Office of Northern Ireland · FamilySearch

Church of Ireland registers from 1634 where they survive; Catholic registers almost nowhere before 1750. The penal laws are the reason, and they are a records fact as much as a political one.
1801–1864 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland National Library of Ireland — Catholic Parish Registers · National Archives of Ireland · PRONI — Public Record Office of Northern Ireland · FamilySearch · Findmypast

The Catholic parish registers begin in earnest — the National Library's microfilms are free and cover nearly every parish. Protestant marriages registered from 1845.
1864–1922 United Kingdom — civil registration IrishGenealogy.ie · National Archives of Ireland · PRONI — Public Record Office of Northern Ireland · FamilySearch

Civil registration of all births, marriages and deaths from 1864, free and photographed on IrishGenealogy.ie. The 1901 and 1911 censuses survive in full and are free at the National Archives.
1922–2026 Irish Free State and Republic in the south; Northern Ireland in the six counties IrishGenealogy.ie · National Archives of Ireland · PRONI — Public Record Office of Northern Ireland · Findmypast

THE TRAP. On 30 June 1922 the Public Record Office in the Four Courts burned with almost every Irish census before 1901, most Church of Ireland registers deposited there, and the wills. Researchers are still told to «look for the census» — there is no census to look for. What survives is what was never sent in: the Catholic parish registers, PRONI's copies in the north, Griffith's Valuation, and the Tithe Applotment books. Start there, not with the census.

No volumes recorded here yet.

The ground worth walking

Within 21 km — 8 places · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Also within 21 km, nothing catalogued

Donagh · Clonca · Moville Lower · Moville Upper · Clonmany · Fahan Lower · Muff · Magilligan

Correctly placed and unread. A gap here is this atlas's silence, not the record's — the registers may well exist and nobody has walked them.

The nearest parishes

A church is a parish and a parish is where a register is kept — the register of a hamlet with no church of its own is kept at the church it walked to, so the distance is the useful part. Wikidata's coverage is very uneven: 34,612 churches in England against 105 in central Istria, so a short list here means thin data and not an empty landscape. Unchecked, and only inside a mapped record region.

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

National sources for Ireland, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

The sources for Ireland

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

  • IrishGenealogy.ie Images, free, no account Dublin, Ireland
    Irish civil registration images and church records, free and without an account. The single best free national source in these islands.
  • National Archives of Ireland Images, free, no account Dublin, Ireland
    What survived 1922 and what was rebuilt since — the 1901 and 1911 censuses in full and free, Tithe Applotment books, wills and the census fragments recovered from other collections.
  • National Library of Ireland — Catholic Parish Registers Images, free, no account Dublin, Ireland
    Every surviving Irish Catholic parish register to 1880, photographed and free. Browse only — no index.
  • PRONI — Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Partly free, partly paid Belfast, United Kingdom
    The record office for the six counties, and the reason Ulster research is not as badly burnt as the rest of Ireland: PRONI held copies and estate papers that were never in the Four Courts. Church records, wills, valuation revision books.
  • Findmypast Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial. The strongest British and Irish collection, including parish registers licensed from diocesan archives and the 1921 census of England and Wales. BT 27 IS NOT ONE FORM AND ITS COLUMNS ARE NOT A CONSTANT. The outward passenger lists were re-drawn across the series, so a field present in one piece proves nothing about another and the era has to be checked before a row is planned around it. Sampled by the Luwinski archive: the 1907 form has NO «last address in the United Kingdom» column at all and buckets ages by nationality instead; the 1937 and 1939 form — printed «P.M. 21», columns (1)–(9) — carries last UK address at (6), country of last permanent residence at (8) and country of intended future permanent residence at (9); a 1951 piece is a typed US military transport manifest filed inside BT 27 with none of the Board of Trade form left. ACROSS EVERY REVISION SEEN, none gives an address in the DESTINATION country — the finest is a country and nothing below it, so «where in Australia did they settle» is not a question this series answers.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Ireland in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

  • Internet Archive Images, free, no account
    Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people.
  • Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
    The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
  • BillionGraves Images, free, no account
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not.
  • Find a Grave Images, free, no account
    Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
  • WikiTree Images, free, no account
    A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
  • Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
    Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free.
  • FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
    The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries.
  • Geni Images, free, account needed
    One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
  • JewishGen Images, free, account needed
    The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
    The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
  • MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Culdaff. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

The whole country — 34

Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.

…and 9 more.

See who held Culdaff between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1534 and 2026.

See Culdaff on the map →

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