I once read an article - which I can't find - written in the first half of the C19th which claimed that although the majority of the Irish immigrants in the Saffron Hill area were RC, they tended to bend to the will of whichever priest braved the slum. I have Cork and Kerry ancestors there in the 1840s-60s and although I have some evidence that they were RC (even up to the end of the century), they did often marry (when they do) in C of E churches. I suppose like many immigrants they lived within their own rules to some extent and I've never come across a baptism with my lot so I assume that if they were baptised they were baptised RC.
Birth registration is no better - my great grandfather was born 1875/6, the sixth of eight that I know of and I've never found a birth cert for any of them.
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