Patent Rolls
The explosion and fire in the Public Record Office of Ireland (30 June 1922) destroyed many important records, amongst which were the medieval Irish chancery rolls. Historians at Trinity College, Dublin have examined existing surrogates and placed their results on a website, CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters c1244 – 1509, which “is the the culmination of nearly four decades of work reconstructing these lost records. It brings together all known letters enrolled on the Irish chancery rolls during the Middle Ages (1244–1509) drawing on originals, facsimiles, transcripts and calendars located in archival repositories in The Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and the US.A. The site contains over 20,000 Irish chancery letters translated from Latin into English, together with an unparalleled collection of digital images of surviving medieval chancery letters and rare printed volumes”.
This site should continue to evolve as further data are added. As of January, 2017 there is a single entry for Parke:
Patent roll 49 of Edward III #264 4 July 1375 Walter Parke in the cantred of Odogh in County Kilkenny
IGI
The first ‘port of call’ for any amateur genealogist in 1983 was the The International Genealogical Index (IGI), which is a computer file created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was first published in 1973 and continued to grow through December 2008.
Although it is acknowledged that coverage is not universal, the IGI contains details of many persons extracted from microfilms of parish registers and other documents from Ireland, as well as personally-contributed data from members of the Church. In 2006, it contained the entries for 5003 occasions of the surnames Park, Parks, Parke and Parkes in Ireland (the surname Parker was not considered when the author performed an extract in 2006), which names appear (in various birth, marriage and death records) to be interchangeable at the whim of either the reporter or the recorder of the original document and its subsequent enumerator.
In 2006, the earliest IGI entries were for:
John Park married 14 April 1592 in Dublin
Mrs Margery Parke (maiden name unknown) born abt 1600 in Ballyredman, Carlow
Ann Park born abt 1600 in Newton, Leitrim.
The earliest family being researched by the 4 original collaborators was that of a ? Parke in Sligo, who had married the sister (Alice?) of a Sir Roger Jones around the cusp of the 16th and 17th centuries.