Trace an Irish-Argentine ancestor

Start with what the family holds: certificates, letters, photographs, the names of the emigrant and the county people remember. Then order the most recent Argentine partidas for your line. In the City of Buenos Aires, birth, marriage and death partidas can be requested online through TAD with a miBA account; a regular partida is free. Families in other provinces use that province's own civil register.

Civil registration in Buenos Aires city began on 10 August 1886. Work back through the civil partidas to the first Argentine-born generation.

For earlier events the city archive holds duplicate parish books for 1858 to 1886 only; the original parish fonds are held by the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. FamilySearch lists a collection titled Argentina, Buenos Aires, Catholic Church Records, 1635 to 2017; we saw it only in search listings and could not open it, so its coverage and access terms are unverified.

Eduardo Coghlan's genealogical catalogue, Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia (Buenos Aires, 1987), is the main source behind the SILAS list of 4,348 Irish settlers in Argentina, arranged by 3,667 male family heads; a companion list, Irish Passengers to Argentina 1822 to 1929, has 7,159 records. Both are free web pages on the society's legacy site, and they often give an Irish county or parish. SILAS itself says it is an academic society with no genealogy database.

Mullingar Library holds Coghlan's book and The Southern Cross on microfilm, and the Longford Westmeath Argentina Society is a community contact for families whose emigrant came from the Midlands.

Argentina's national archive runs a free online search of passengers who arrived by sea at the port of Buenos Aires between 1882 and 1937, from the Migraciones entry books: searchable by date range, name, surname and ship, none mandatory, with a PDF of the record and, where digitised, the ledger page. CEMLA's digitised ship-arrival books are stated as covering 1882 to 1950; its own search page gave no coverage dates or prices when we opened it.

irishgenealogy.ie, the state site, offers online indexes and register images of Irish civil records: births 1864 to 1925, marriages 1845 to 1950, deaths 1871 to 1975, with further deaths being added; privacy rules limit online access to births over 100 years old, marriages over 75 and deaths over 50. It also hosts church records. Irish civil registration began in April 1845 for non-Catholic and civil marriages and became compulsory for all births, marriages and deaths in January 1864.

The National Archives of Ireland offers online searches of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, surviving earlier fragments and the 1926 census, and lists a Genealogy Advisory Service.

Certified Irish civil certificates come from the General Register Office in Roscommon at EUR 20; a research-only copy of an entry costs less. Order a certified certificate only when an application, such as the Foreign Births Register, needs it.

Free: the national archive's arrivals search, the SILAS lists, irishgenealogy.ie and the census search; a regular Buenos Aires partida. Paid: GRO certificates and Argentine apostilles at ARS 4,500 (about USD 3 at ARS 1,540 on 6 October 2026). Coghlan's book is in libraries, not online.

The former Embassy of Ireland genealogy page for Argentina now redirects to the ireland.ie home page, and the embassy's services page has no genealogy section. No current online archive of The Southern Cross was found. UK outbound passenger lists, which many emigrants appear in because they sailed via Liverpool, were not researched. If you know a source we are missing, tell us.