Irish Resources on-line

Irish On-line resources just keep expanding. One of the latest: -

Irish Archives Resource web portal http://www.iar.ie/index.shtml

This portal will link you to archival collections throughout Ireland. Archives are the documents and records that relate to people, places, organisations, and events. You can use this portal to locate archives relating to your area of interest or research topic. The site provides links to 34 archive collections. Essentially the Irish Archives Resource is an “… online database which contains searchable archival descriptions. It does not hold any archives or records but provides a means to search archival descriptions from various contributing institutions”.

But don’t forget: -

National Archives, Ireland http://www.genealogy.nationalarchives.ie/

From the National Archives Genealogy Website you can access the Census Records for 1901 and 1911, Census survivals for 1821-51, Census Search forms for 1841-51, the Tithe Applotment Books from 1823 to 1837, the Soldiers’ Wills from 1914 to 1917, and the Calendars of Wills and Administrations from 1858 to 1922.

This site will have large numbers of other genealogical records added to it over the coming years, including Valuation Office House and Field Books, 1848 – 60

All of these records are free to access, through searchable databases and linked images of relevant pages. Eventually, the site will contain all of the important and easily accessible genealogical material in the custody of the National Archives

National Library of Ireland http://www.nli.ie/en/family-history-introduction.aspx

Contains some excellent suggestions, methodology, descriptions and explanations of sources as well as links to tracing your Irish Family History.

Irish Genealogy http://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/

This website is operated by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht & provides users with the opportunity to search a wide range of record sources in their search of their Irish Ancestry. It is home to the on-line Indexes of the Civil Registers (GRO) of Births, Marriages, Civil Partnerships and Deaths and to Church Records of Baptism, Marriage and Burial from a number of counties. The website also operates as a search portal that allows users to search the following record sources as well:

• 1901/1911 Census records and pre-1901 survivals
• Census Search forms from 1841/1851
• Tithe Applotments
• Soldiers' Wills
• Griffith's Valuations
• Ireland - Australia Transportation database
• Military Archives
• Ellis Island
• National Photographic Archive from the National Library of Ireland

Family Search https://familysearch.org/search

The Family Search database provides free access to 19 collections of Irish records covering the years 1619 -2013. They are made up of 38,696,281 indexed records and 19,553,476 record images. 

More on FamilySearch's Indexing Day

A follow-up on the FamilySearch International Indexing Day –
A new record was set with 66,511 volunteers participating. While there was a minimum requirement for participation - a single batch of indexing or arbitration work - it is appears that many volunteers continued working throughout the day as they produced the second-highest combined (indexed or arbitrated) total of submitted records at just over 5.7 million, which is a monumental crowd-sourcing effort. So now is the time to check FamilySearch again with nearly 6 million records recently indexed.

Worldwide Indexing Day

FamilySearch will run its next ‘worldwide indexing day’ on Monday July 21. This has been held for the past few years and is intended to inspire many to start indexing, while also prompting existing indexers to do a little more (at least on that day). FamilySearch, on average adds about 500,000 images to their website a week, and through their current volunteer indexers they get about a million entries indexed in the same timeframe. A single scanned image might have one name on it, or it might have fifty names on it – it simply depends on the type of document, so you’ll see that there’s a whole lot of indexing that needs doing. Worldwide indexing day runs for 24 hours and starts on Sunday July 20, 6pm MDT time in the US, which for us here in Australia translates to Monday July 21, 10am (AEST).

If you are interested in indexing, you don’t have to wait to the last minute to get involved. You can get started right away. Go to https://FamilySearch.org/indexing and find a project that interests you and get involved. Do some practicing before the July 21, 2014 Indexing Event.

Irish Ancestry

Irish ancestry is often hard to trace reliably, but there has been a real push to get Irish genealogy resources online.
Irish Newspaper archive 1820-1926
FindMyPast Ireland has added over 100 years of old Irish newspapers to its online collection. The overall coverage is:
The Belfast Morning News (1857-1882)
The Belfast Newsletter (1828-1900)
The Cork Examiner (1841-1926)
The Dublin Evening Mail (1849-1871)
The Freeman’s Journal (1820-1900)
The Sligo Champion (1836-1926)
This collection is accessible on all Findmypast international sites (UK, Aus, or US) available at Manly Library. You can read the full announcement of it here.

The Irish Genealogical Research Society has launched an online index to its annual journal The Irish Genealogist. The journal was first published in 1937 and contains hundreds of thousands of family names with reference to a variety of different sources.

Censuses and Guiness Employee Records
Ancestry.com has added to their Irish records with three new databases:
Ireland Guinness Archive Index, 1824-2002
Ireland Census 1901 Census
Ireland Census 1911 Census
The census records are an index only but they link to the National Archive of Ireland, which then allows you to view the images.
The Guinness Archive is employee records and include details such as name, date of birth, date of death, date they joined the company, spouse name etc.

Tithe Applotment Books 1814-1855

These are available on FamilySearch and determine the amount which occupiers of agricultural holdings over one acre should pay in tithes to the Church of Ireland. Urban areas are not included.  FamilySearch has all of these Tithe Applotment Books indexed, as well as links to the original images.

Irish Marriage Finder

The Irish Genealogical Research Society's Marriage Finder has now reached 50,000 names. It features information gathered from an array of sources, including Chancery bills, diaries, deeds, marriage settlements, memorial inscriptions, wills, family letters and newspaper cuttings. The database is online and free to use on the website of the IGRS at http://www.irishancestors.ie/?page_id=1926 and a "how to use it" introduction is available at http://www.irishancestors.ie/?page_id=1921.

 

FamilySearch & FindMyPast Partnership

FamilySearch has announced yet another agreement, this time with FindMyPast. More than 13 million records from FamilySearch have been uploaded onto FindMyPast, including major collections of births, marriages and deaths covering America, Australia and Ireland. However little has been said about the advantages for FamilySearch. The Ancestry Insider Blogspot notes that in recent weeks FamilySearch has entered into strategic agreements with Ancestry.com, MyHeritage and DC Thompson Family History, giving each access to millions or billions of FamilySearch’s records.  This is supposed to expand online access for millions of people. Olive Tree Genealogy has also written about this latest pairing.

MyHeritage and FamilySearch

MyHeritage and FamilySearch had announced a Strategic Partnership. This will mean MyHeritage users will benefit from the historical records digitised by FamilySearch and FamilySearch users will benefit from the more powerful search engine technologies created by MyHeritage.  FamilySearch will be able to use MyHeritage’s SuperSearch, which is a sophisticated search engine for historical records with Smart Matching, a means of matching up ancestors using a fuzzy matching algorithm, that overcomes minor errors and alternative spellings The full press release is at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20131014006192/en , but Dick Eastman has also written an article about the partnership in his blog, with a follow-up article the next day. Dick goes into a quite a lot of detail with some excellent background information on both companies - a very informative and interesting read.

FamilySearch & Ancestry Partnership

There have been mixed reactions to the announcement about the FamilySearch and Ancestry Partnership. (See 1 Billion Records to be Digitised posted 10 September 2103). In response to the negative feedback, FamilySeach has tried to answer the most frequently asked questions, such as ‘How does the family history community benefit?’ and ‘Will people have to pay to see records indexed by FamilySearch volunteers?’. For their full response see the FamilySearch Blog.

The Ancestry Insider Blogspot has also responded to allay fears.

1 billion records to be digitised

Great news for genealogists! There has been an announcement this week that Ancestry.com and FamilySearch have come to an agreement to digitise over 1 billion records from FamilySearch’s Granite Mountain vaults. Over the past seven years volunteers around the world have been indexing and digitizing the LDS Church’s vast collection of genealogical records, and on April 19, 2013 they reached the phenomenal “1 billion” searchable records mark, that have been added to the FamilySearch.org website.

While new records are being digitised and are going online straight away, FamilySearch has a collection of over 2.4 million rolls of microfilm containing photographic images of historical documents from 110 countries. It is literally going to take years to get these all online and digitised, let alone indexed as well, so this new agreement with Ancestry.com will speed-up the whole process. This agreement proposes that Ancestry.com and FamilySearch will increasingly share international sets of records more collaboratively, however financial and administrative details have not been released. You can read more in the Ancestry.com press release and Salt Lake City’s “Deseret News” newspaper.

RootsMagic for PAF Users

RootsMagic has seen a marketing opportunity with the demise of FamilySearch’s Personal Ancestral File (PAF). They are offering a free publication, RootsMagic for PAF Users: a Quick Start Guide, which can be downloaded in ebook or PDF formats. RootsMagic assures PAF users that their family history can be seamlessly imported into a RootsMagic product. They have even set up a special website at http://www.rootsmagic.com/PAF/ containing training videos etc., to make the transition as painless as possible. And now for the crunch – for a limited time they are offering PAF users the full version of RootsMagic for only $19.95. This is still cheap and worth considering and they are also offering a free version of RootsMagicEssentials that offers the basic abilities of PAF plus the certified FamilySearch Family Tree features. It is a small price to pay for the support and expertise of RootsMagic.

Personal Ancestral File (PAF) Discontinued

If you are a user of Personal Ancestral File (PAF) like I am, you will be disappointed to learn that the product is to be discontinued. FamilySearch has announced that the program will be retired on 15 July 2013 and will no longer be available for download or support. I have found this a wonderful product to use as it did all I needed in organising my family history and for free. Dick Eastman and Ancestry Insider have both noted its passing. PAF was first introduced in 1984, but has not been updated since 2002. You can still keep using the program, but FamilySearch recommend that you update to an alternative. So it seems like a good time to bite the bullet and try something else. For full details and information on alternative products, you can visit http://familysearch.org/PAF.

Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree, and RootsMagic have been introduced in recent years are supposed to be significantly better alternatives to PAF. These products are also available free through FamilySearch.

Top providers sharing records!!

AncestryInsider recently revealed that FamilySearch and Ancestry.com sometimes swap records, and sometimes they work together on a project, which results in both organisations providing access to the same records.  (They have recently worked together to digitise, index and publish U.S. probate records). However they both have their own digitisation teams out imaging records, and it would be very rare for both organisations to scan the same records, as it would not be to their economic advantage. Worth remembering as FamilySearch provides free access to its records. For more information on this read the original article at http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/monday-mailbox-familysearch-vs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AncestryInsider+(The+Ancestry+Insider)