The Catholic parish records database at http://registers.nli.ie/
is barely 24 hours old, and already I’ve been binge-searching it! I have to say I’m quite impressed
overall. In 20 years of genealogy
research, I’ve had basic exposure to Irish Catholic parish records that
probably mirrors the experience of many of us doing family history from here in
the states. Starting with dealing with
the county heritage centers in the 1990’s, moving to ordering films from the
LDS when they were available, to more recently using the RootsIreland and Irish
Genealogy databases online, I feel I’ve got a fairly good handle on the
limitations, availability and condition of the records, especially those in the
parishes I am most familiar with from Counties Laois, Wicklow, Clare and
Galway. This familiarity, along with the
knowledge that these records were going to be searchable page by page only,
prepared me fairly well for today’s debut.
Still I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised. The records are pretty much as I expected,
but the website itself and its search features are a definite positive. It’s obvious that the National Library took
great pains to make the database as user-friendly as possible. This is something I greatly appreciate,
knowing the hours of eyestrain that it can take to find a single record on
microfilm.
The search is fairly straight forward if one knows the
parish and an approximate date. Clear
details are given as to the holdings of each parish- the years covered for
baptisms and marriages, the number of images.
You can click on whichever roll within the parish contains the year you
are interested in. The image quality is
also very good- I was able to navigate, and zoom in and out and maintain a
clear image. One function I love is the
ease of searching page to page- no need to click a forward arrow to advance to
the next image like on Ancestry or Family Search’s databases, simply just keep
scrolling down to get to the next page.
Downloading the images was also easy and I was able to import into
Picasa to enhance them for better readability.
Traditionally, we are lead to believe that the parishes
around Dublin kept better and more detailed records than the “wilder”, more
far-reaching parishes in the west of Ireland.
I found the records I looked through for counties Clare and Galway to be
much easier to read than those from Laois and Wicklow- all from roughly the
same time period. So expect a few
challenges to pre-conceived notions you might be holding on to!
Of course we know that not all parish records are created
equal- spidery, faded writing is still going to be migraine-inducing even on an
oversized monitor. “Gaps and omissions”
are going to remain a serious problem in many of the records. (I did notice in the Aughrim, County Galway
baptism records the priest had made a notation that the records were missing
for an 18 month period of time- which could very well explain the absence of my
husband’s GG grandfather’s baptism record)
Despite these unavoidable limitations, I can see many researchers making
important discoveries using this database, and it is one I will be returning to
frequently. There’s something simply
magical about seeing your ancestor’s name leap off a page of records from his
or her homeland- it deepens our connection and solidifies our place in our
family history. Kudos to the National
Library for providing the opportunity for people around the world to have this
experience!
