Family History Sites

I can't answer your full question because my research has only been in UK records but I've experience mostly of Ancestry and a bit with Find My Past. These sites hold many of the same records but also different records so you need to bear that in mind before signing up and handing over a lot of money. The other thing is that, in my experience, the transcription differs from one site to the other. There's not a lot you can do about that and one site isn't better than another (all down to human input) but if you can't find an ancestor or a family on a census on one site it's very possible they've been mistranscribed but may be easily found somewhere else. I've found Green transcribed at Grun and Lee as See, for example. Good luck!

There is a Genealogy/Memories forum on this site which gave me some assistance when I was looking.

My local library has a subscription to Ancestry.com. You have to use the library computer to access it (you can't access it from home) and it's free for library members, but it might be worth having a look before deciding if you want to take out your own subscription. Or maybe just use the library computer to do the research you can't do at home.

Thank you all for your advice. Trying the Library sounds good as the main library does have a family research centre.

Irish records are rather thin on the ground and patchy. A lot of records were destroyed during the troubles between c 1910 - 1920 and a lot of census records were also pulped during a paper shortage during (I think WW1).