Good news for those of us searching their Irish Catholic ancestors! The National Library of Ireland has announced that it will give free online access to its archive of Catholic Church records, the earliest of which dates back to the 1700s.They cover 1,091 parishes throughout Ireland and are mainly baptismal and marriage records. This new project adds to the over 2.5 million images of Irish births, deaths and marriage records from the General Register Office (GRO), released online in September 2015. The earlier set of records is available on www.irishgenealogy.ie The records cover births from 1864 to 1915, marriages from 1882 to 1940 and deaths from 1891 to 1965.
Read the full story at All of Ireland’s Catholic Church records to go online
4 comments:
This seems to be old news, as these registers have been online for a couple of years now. Please clarify. Thanks!
Dear "Anonymous" (btw I dislike comments where the person doesn't give their name but hides under an anonymous label)
It is not clear to me whether these records ARE online already or are still to come. The original article that I linked to was published in February this year. I explored and did research on the actual site that is publishing the records and couldn't decide if the ones being talked about are there or not.
I'll leave it to individual researchers to have a look around and decide for themselves.
I've noticed in the past that the source of this news story (IrishCentral) tends to recycle their stories, so something posted recently could actually be quite old. In this case, yes, Anonymous is right, this is old news. The National Library website is different from irishgenealogy.ie. - the latter is mostly civil registrations from the GRO, with very limited church records. The National Library church records are located at http://registers.nli.ie/ and have been up a few years now. The IrishCentral article doesn't make that clear, unfortunately, since it doesn't include a link to the NLI site, but then links to the article about irishgenealogy.ie instead.
The Irish Central article linked to this blog is confused. These Catholic records were released in 2015 on the site http://registers.nli.ie/ and have been freely available to search for over two years. The nli site allows a search by parish, within a county, and then to narrow the event by year and month. Registers for an individual parish can be browsed. In March 2016 Ancestry and FindMyPast teamed up to provide an index to the records on the nli website. Access to the index on FindMyPast is free to all, once you have set up a free account. The same index is on Ancestry but only available to paid subscribers.
The 2.5 million records referred to from the GRO were released online on irishgenealogy.ie in September 2016. The image attached to this blog relates to a marriage index from the collection from the GRO rather than a Catholic church register.
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