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Anglican parish registers started in 1538, though few survive before 1600. Most are in County Record Offices and many – not all – are indexed at www.familysearch.org. Transcripts of a good number are at the SoG.

Protestants from Northern Ireland are more likely to appear in registers of Presbyterian chapels. Presbyterianism was widespread in England during the mid-17th century but, though made legal in 1698, it rapidly lost ground to Methodism in the next century. Surviving registers are mostly indexed in www.familysearch.org with the originals in TNA series RG 10, as described in D.J. Steel, Sources for Nonconformist Genealogy and Family History (Phillimore for SoG, 1973). More information can be sought at United Reformed Church Archives.

Most Irish immigrants were Catholics. Catholicism survived Henry VIII’s 16th-century Reformation, but rapidly dwindled to a hard core of nobles, gentry and their tenants. Since 1791 Catholic chapels were legalised: in many cases the first ones built in towns – Bradford, Halifax and Rotherham, for example – were for Irish famine migrants. Priests tended to be the younger sons of the surviving English Catholic gentry, many of them Lancastrian: it was not until the 20th century that the Irish Catholic priest (usually with a hip-flask of whiskey secreted in his cassock) became a familiar figure in England.