Searching Irish records

[brickwalls]

Firstly, if this should be in the 'Tips' section, I apologise.

Secondly, many people will no doubt have some cause to attempt to search the Irish records at some point in order to further our research. Here are a few URLs I've found which have been of use.

Starting Points
The Irish Family History Foundation has been a good place for me to start. It provides a free search of records (registration required), and allows you to search a specific county or all 32 counties. Originals are available to view for a charge of â"šÂ¬5 each.
1901/1911 Census is available free to search and view through the National Archives.ie site.


County Specific
There is a similar project to FreeBMD being done in Ireland, however their search mechanism isn't as good. Nor can you view original records. http://www.cmcrp.net/
The site is a little difficult to navigate, and usability results can vary, however some of the information contained in there can be useful.

Does anyone know of any other sites which are good for Irish records?

[MarkCDodd]

The Irish Family History Association should be ashamed of their blatant over pricing.

a) You can't narrow down the baptism records by entering one of the parent names. So if I look for a John Murphy born County Wickslow 1864 to 1866 I get 50 hits. I would have to pay £5 to view each record and hope its not number 50 by the time I get the right one.
b) Same with marriages. You get to enter the bride or groom name and then fork out £5 each time to find the one you want.
c) You do not even get a copy of the original Church registry entry. Just a text result which means you are completely at the mercy of the transcriber.
d) Additional information that may be in the Parish Register is never included as part of the transcription.
e) There is ZERO discount for buying larger numbers of credits.

I hate that site and am preying that Mormons expand their coverage ASAP.

[brickwalls]

The â"šÂ¬5 is to view a text record and not the original image? Now that is shocking.

Hopefully other websites will soon be able to offer what they are, at a reasonable price.

[brickwalls]

Further to this, I can't help but think that the IFHF is either terribly unreliable, or incomplete. I know that records were destroyed in 1922, and also certain census records were destroyed by order of the Irish Free State government, but I've found it has no record of certain relatives.

During my research today, I managed to trace certain relatives through the English BMD. Cross-checking their details with the IFHF has found nothing. Similarly, cross-checking IFHF with Census data can also throw up a blank. I know that late registrations were a problem in Ireland, but I can't help but feel they're using that and the destruction of records as an excuse.

[MarkCDodd]

The Church records are almost complete in every County.

It is just that nobody has combined all of the transcribed registers into a single database.

So you have to visit several sites even to cover a single county.

[brickwalls]

The Church records are almost complete in every County.

It is just that nobody has combined all of the transcribed registers into a single database.

So you have to visit several sites even to cover a single county.

The Irish Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport appear to have started to collect all of the records into one place. The collection is small at the minute, with Carlow (COI), Cork & Rosscommon (RC), Dublin (COI, RC, PRESBY), and Kerry (COI, RC) only being available. However I'd imagine they're aiming to get all records online.

http://www.irishgenealogy.ie/welcome.html

[jac]

This is where I found my 2xg.grandparents marriage..

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... eesegenes/

Jac

[MarkCDodd]

The Irish Family History Foundation is now introducing a new search engine but they are still going to squeeze you for every dollar.

With Baptism/Birth searches, in addition to all the search fields in the Standard Search, you can now also search by Mother's First Name and Mother's Surname, by combining this with the Father's First Name and Surname it allows you to easily find all siblings within the same family. (It allows you to narrow down the one John Murphy with father Patrick from the other 49!!!).

With Marriage searches, in addition to all the search fields in the Standard search, you can now search by Spouse's First Name, Spouse's Surname, Father's First Name (please note that the names of parents may not been recorded in the original record).

The catch? If your advanced search find multiple entries you must order ALL of those entries. They will not allow you to order just one. So if Iused the advanced search on a good Roman Catholic family with 22 children then it would cost me a lot of money

The work around?

Create two accounts. One you do the searches with, the other you use to order only the certificates you want.

Currently they are testing the new search engine with the following counties: Cavan, Fermanagh, Galway West, Kildare, Kilkenny, Tipperary North, Tyrone, and Westmeath.

[brickwalls]

That's just shocking, and it's going to confuse a lot of people. Just reading the description has made my head hurt, God only knows what it will be like when the changes are made across the site.

As much as I don't agree with the reasons behind the LDS genealogy project, I do think they should hurry up and sort out their Irish records. Provide some proper competition for the IFHF.