The Methodist Church...
There are relatively few Methodist churches in the Newry area.
To begin with the majority of Methodists belonged to the Established Church and they remained members of their own local churches. Therefore they continued to go to the parish church for the administration of marriages, burials and baptisms.
In 1816 a split developed between the Primitive Wesleyan Methodists, who retained their links with the Established Church, and the Wesleyan Methodists, who allowed their ministers to administer baptisms.
The majority
of Methodist baptism and marriage registers do not begin
until the 1830s and 1845 respectively. There are very few Methodist
burial registers, because Methodist churches rarely had their
own burial grounds. However, an important record is a large
volume of baptismal entries for Methodist churches throughout
Ireland deriving from the administrative records of the Methodist
Church in Ireland (MIC/429/1), which may have been the product
of an attempt to compile a central register of baptisms. Although
incomplete, it contains baptisms from 1815 to 1840 that often
pre-date the existing baptismal registers of Methodist churches.
