Available Baptismal Records
Few of Leitrim's baptismal records pre-date the 1830s. What records do exist have been compiled in this collection mostly from the records on the subscription site www.rootsireland.ie. This site offers transcriptions only but where the baptismal register in question is on the National Library of Ireland's Parish Register website (www.registers.nli.ie) a link is given to bring the searcher onto the relevant digitised version of the register. These digitised registers can be freely browsed on the National Library website.
Not all of the registers found by Leitrim Genealogy Centre in presenting the data onto www.rootsireland.ie are on the National Library website as those registers were never digitised. Therefore for these only transcriptions are in the public domain though it is possible that an individual parish could allow a researcher access to these un-digitised records.
Data on the Baptismal registers
The data available varies from parish to parish, and even within parish, from year to year. My book Tracing Your Leitrim Ancestors lists what registers are known to be in the public domain, either in transcription or digitised format. The subscription website www.rootsireland.ie shows the details available on it in transcribed form.
The registers will always give the name of the child and the date of his or her baptism. They will name the parents and the sponsors. In some cases a place is given which, in my interpretation of the data for this collection, I have taken to be the place of birth. This, however, might not always hold true as, in reality, the place, if and when quoted, was that of the residence of the family. In most cases, though, this was also the place of birth.
Finally, the parish in which the baptism took place is always known. In my records I have not always been consistent in naming. For example, baptisms occurring in Bornacoola Parish are entered usually as taking place in Bornacoola Church, but this is not always a safe statement. Not only does Bornacoola parish have a chapel in the townland of Cloonturk in which baptisms would have been performed, but many baptisms would have been performed in the child's home. Therefore, for most baptisms the safest thing to assume is simply that they took place in the parish named, but not always in its main church.
Baptism before Birth?
See also note on Irish Phenomenon in section Birth Records from GRO