To celebrate the project achieving the milestone of half a million entries in the main index, one of our wonderful volunteers, Don, has provided a very significant update to the townland index transcription. We thank all our volunteers for their continuing great work.

With this update, transcriptions of the earliest three volumes of townland indexes for County Antrim are now complete, along with the first two volumes for County Down.

The time period covered by these transcriptions is:
County Antrim 1708-1820 (112 years in total).
County Down 1708-1810 (102 years in total).
This includes Belfast 1708-1820.

The transcription was an enormous work since many of these early pages have were severely smudged and a great deal of detective work was required to recreate the text. Moreover, during transcription, more than 900 errors were found in the original indexes. These have been corrected in the transcription.
By contrast, from 1811 the townland index books are quite legible, and transcription is straightforward.