The Irish General Register Office was an offshoot of the Victorian public health system and was an attempt to provide some measure of relief for the most destitute people. Between 1838 and 1852, 163 workhouses were built throughout the country, each at the centre of an area known as a Poor Law Union.

The workhouses were normally situated in a large market town, and the Poor Law Union comprised the town and its catchment area. The result was that the unions in many cases ignored the existing boundaries of parish and county.

In the 1850s a large-scale public health system was created, based on the areas covered by the Poor Law Unions. Each union was divided into separate districts, with an average of six to seven districts per union.

A Medical Officer, normally a doctor, was given responsibility for public health in each district, known as a dispensary district. When the registration of all births, deaths and marriages began in 1864 these dispensary districts also became registrar's districts, with a registrar who was responsible for collecting the registrations within the district.

In most cases, the Medical Officer for the dispensary district also acted as the registrar for the same area. The superior of the registrar was the Superintendent Registrar, responsible for all the registers within the old Poor Law Union.

The returns for the entire Poor Law Union (also known both as the Superintendent Registrar's District and, simply, the registration district) were forwarded to Dublin, where they were copied and then returned to the local office. The copies were then indexed and organised centrally, and master indexes for the entire country were produced at the General Register Office in Dublin. These are the indexes that are now used for public research in Belfast and Dublin.

Because of the history of the system responsibility for registration still rests with the Department of Health in the Republic. In the North, the office is now part of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

The arrangement in the South is that the local health boards hold the original registers, with the General Register Office at 8-11 Lombard St, Dublin 2, holding the master indexes to all 32 counties up to 1921 and the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland after that date. In Northern Ireland the 26 district councils created in the local government reform of 1973 are now the registration authorities for their areas.

It is also possible to carry out research in the local registrar's offices around the country, although this is at the discretion of the local officials. In some cases, particularly for common surnames, this can be the only way to reconstruct a whole family, since the research is on the original registers, rather than indexes.

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