July 8 is a day family historians with Irish roots worldwide
are eagerly anticipating. That’s the day
many of us will have the opportunity to get closer to our ancestors than we
ever have before. The National Library
collection of Catholic parish records is scheduled to go online-bringing to the
comfort of our own homes what we formerly had to travel all the way to Dublin
to see. I’m not knocking a trip to
Dublin, of course, but wouldn’t that trip to Ireland be that much more
meaningful if you could actually SEE your ancestor’s baptism record before you
arrived?
Many of us have discovered the origins of our Irish
ancestors courtesy of the County Heritage Center system, set up in the 1980’s
to accommodate the growing numbers of descendants of Irish immigrants who
wished to discover their roots. Still
more have used the transcription-only database of the Irish Family History
Foundation, the unified organization of the heritage centers, at
RootsIreland. And some of us have even
gone so far as to order films of parish records from the Family History
Library, just to see for ourselves the handwritten records that show our
ancestors. The July 8 unveiling will
bring all of this to us, for free!
Be prepared! These
images are not going to be accessible via search engine. You will not be able to put your ancestor’s
name into a little box, hit a button, and poof!
Instead you will have to know the county, parish, and an approximate
year in order to get started searching.
In an era where a lot of internet-trained genealogists are used to
nearly instant gratification, the concept of wading through page after page of
spidery, smudged, faded, scribbled and all-too-often illegible handwriting is
truly a foreign one. Many of us will be
transported back to a time before some census records had indexes (remember
1870?) and we would have to search whole towns and counties to find our
ancestors, a not terribly happy memory!
John Grenham has recently blogged that the image quality is
outstanding, but this doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have to do some
work. Having viewed a few of these records in my day, I can tell
you the form and quality varies widely from parish to parish. Two examples I have in my personal collection
are shown below.
You can see there is a vast difference in the above two baptism records. In general, it will be best to have an idea of the exact parish, date and names of parents before attempting to search page by page. The transcribed records available at www.rootsireland.ie can be used as a sort of "index" to locating the record of your choice in the National Library database. Now, the countdown begins! Only 58 days!
