These should be contacted by mail, fax, telephone or e-mail well before going to Ireland. Some heritage centres are well advanced in their indexing and have a variety of sources in their databases. Many now have e-mail addresses and Internet sites, and some take credit cards to expedite service. Most of the heritage centres in Ireland belong to the Irish Family History Foundation. The information includes background history regarding the county, what records have been indexed by the centre, and what publications are available.
Some heritage centres have their own individual Internet web sites and e-mail addresses.
Most records relating to the Republic of Ireland counties are centralized in Dublin, and those for the Northern Ireland counties are largely centralized in Belfast. This replaces the service formerly offered in the Genealogical Office and is located in a special Genealogy Room at the National Library 2. The townland is the smallest official geographical unit in Ireland. A townland is a surveyed piece of ground consisting of between a few acres and several thousand acres. Usually, but not always, townlands have Gaelic names.