A barony in the context of genealogical records was a real estate holding of a baron, normally inherited by his heir. The barony performed some local government functions, but this power declined over time. It did administer to the tenants.

Some land valuation records are organized by barony, then by civil parish within the barony. If you are looking at a particular civil parish you might find the records split on the viewing media if the civil parish crossed barony boundaries.

A liberty was typically an area of a town and within the boundaries of a land barony, but was free from control by the barony, for commercial and business purposes.

Land valuation records all the way through Griffith's Valuation are grouped together by barony on old films, and then by civil parish within the barony. After Griffith's the land valuation reporting structure changed to Union and DED within the Union.

The 1659 survey, sometimes called Pender's census, is one of the older genealogical sources of information organized mostly by barony. It is not really a census but did tally the number of households in each barony by surname.

In the Pender document, a barony is broken down into its civil parishes. Titled inhabitants (tituladoes) are listed by townland names within the civil parishes. With each barony (or organizational unit) is a count of the occurrences of the surnames that appeared within that unit.

No genealogical data collection is perfectly intact. The pages covering some Cork baronies are missing from the Pender survey. Another key source of landholder data about this time period, the Civil Survey, was taken starting about 1654, even before the Pender survey. For County Cork, the Civil Survey survived only for the barony of Muskerry.

Cromwell confiscation data is extracted from O'Hart.

1659 data is extracted from O'Laughlin.