Wright family who came to Ontario Canada around 1820

Beth,

The events you are looking for are long before the start of birth and marriage registration in Ireland (1845 for marriages and 1864 for births) so you won’t find any birth or marriage certificates for them. You might find baptism and church marriage records but to do that you need to know the place these events occurred, together with the precise denomination.

You have mentioned that the family might be Church of Ireland and/or Methodists.

Methodism took a lot longer to become established in Ireland as a separate denomination than in England. In Ireland there was considerable resistance to separating from the Church of Ireland. It was 1815 before Methodists agreed to conduct their own baptisms. However because of continuing loyalty and other factors, many continued to use the Church of Ireland for sacraments for many years after this date and it was 1871 before all Methodists routinely performed their own baptisms.

For marriages, the earliest ceremonies conducted by a Methodist Minister in Ireland that I am aware of, date from 1835 (Belfast Donegall Square, the first Methodist church in Ireland). However in the mid 1800s there were only a few Methodist Ministers in Ireland (Methodism relied heavily on lay preachers). So the shortage of Ministers contributed to the continuing practice of marrying in the Church of Ireland. In addition, in the early years, many Methodist Meeting Houses were not licensed for marriages so that too contributed to couples marrying in the Church of Ireland.

So to summarise, you are unlikely to find many Methodist baptisms before 1830. Few marriages before the 1840s and only a handful for many years after that. If there are no Methodist records in the location you are interested in, I would search the Church of Ireland instead, as that’s the most likely place to find the relevant event. In your particular case, your family were born and married before Methodism got going in Ireland so I would focus on Church of Ireland records, where they survive (a lot of early records were lost in the 1922 fire in Dublin during the Civil War. Ironically they had been sent there for safe keeping).

If you don’t know where in Co. Down the family came from, you could employ a researcher to go through the surviving church records. There are 69 Church of Ireland parishes in Co. Down so that’s a fair number of records but since about 40% are lost the search is reduced slightly. But it’s probably a couple of days research). Copies of most of the surviving records are in PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast.

Researchers in the PRONI area: http://sgni.net

Another option might be DNA testing which might link you to folk who know more about the family origins in Co. Down.