The great big NLI digitisation project

Coolnabacky1873

Most of ye have probably seen this.

It is going to be very interesting to see who gets the contract.

Ancestry? FMP via brightsolid? Can irishgenealogy.ie bid?

What will the Irish Family History Forum do?

Also, I would love to see what OCR software is going to be able to index some of those horrific registers like some of the 1830s Monaghan ones I was recently looking through

Waitsian

Coolnabacky1873 wrote: »

Most of ye have probably seen this.

It is going to be very interesting to see who gets the contract.

Ancestry? FMP via brightsolid? Can irishgenealogy.ie bid?

Oh boy, things are looking up, with this and the news of the tender being sought for the digitization of the GRONI records up north.

Fantastic news.

AD61

Coolnabacky1873 wrote: »

Can irishgenealogy.ie bid?

This would be brilliant. Too much to hope for?

eqwjewoiujqorj

From a genealogy point of view, the main thing is the Parish Registers and to a lesser extent, the electoral registers and newspapers.


However, two points about the parish registers:

1. They only go up to around 1880 in the NLI.
Roots Ireland have the registers up to 1920, so you may still have to use Roots, even if the NLI have more accurate transcriptions and a better search engine.

2. Ancestry have already the registers on their site, which they copied from the NLI.
Although when I used it around the time they released theirs, there was only one sponsor given.


As for the newspapers, Irish Newspaper Archive will probably have most of the newspapers in Ireland on their site by the time the NLI have digitized their collection.

Not bad news by any means, but not earth shattering either.

pinkypinky

eqwjewoiujqorj wrote: »

2. Ancestry have already the registers on their site, which they copied from the NLI.
Although when I used it around the time they released theirs, there was only one sponsor given.

Do they? I thought they had the same as familysearch.org - which are volunteer submitted. I don't have an ancestry membership atm, could someone please confirm?

shanew

Ancestry have transcript of some RC registers - no detailed source list that I know of on their website.

I've seen records from counties Wexford, Meath, Roscommon etc, but very 'scattered' coverage.




S.

eqwjewoiujqorj

pinkypinky wrote: »

Do they? I thought they had the same as familysearch.org - which are volunteer submitted. I don't have an ancestry membership atm, could someone please confirm?

There was a big hullabaloo last Sept when Ancestry.com released the Parish Registers.
Apparently, they did it without the consent of the NLI.

Irish Times
IGN


They also released the BMD indexes around the same time, which are the same as Family Search.

And here's the thread on boards.
And IGN


That's about a year ago, not sure if the quality of Ancestry's offering has improved, as they were not well received at the time.

LINK

Personally, I found them ok, for the small bit of research I did on them, except for the fact that only one sponsor was given.

Hopefully, when the NLI records go online, it will be possible to see a scan of the original record, like the census records.

Menas

eqwjewoiujqorj wrote: »

There was a big hullabaloo last Sept when Ancestry.com released the Parish Registers.
Apparently, they did it without the consent of the NLI.

Irish Times
IGN


They also released the BMD indexes around the same time, which are the same as Family Search.

And here's the thread on boards.
And IGN


That's about a year ago, not sure if the quality of Ancestry's offering has improved, as they were not well received at the time.

LINK

Personally, I found them ok, for the small bit of research I did on them, except for the fact that only one sponsor was given.

Hopefully, when the NLI records go online, it will be possible to see a scan of the original record, like the census records.

I have an subscription to ancestry and have had for the last few weeks. But I have cancelled it as I really find it of little use as most of the searches I do give me a BMD index record which is the same as the mormons.
The other family trees on there are also of little use. The few that have looked usefull have turned out to be little more than guesswork (as admitted by the owners i contacted).
When you hit brick walls in your research you need more than guess work and BMD indices.

I would guess that whoever gets these records will implement a Scotish type model for viewing records. I am ok with that as long as they give you enough detail to avoid paying for non-relevant records.

On a seperate note it is good to see that there are now a good few sites, pay and free, that are working on graveyard records. There is a wealth of undocumented info out there that could open a lot of doors for us amateur slueths!

eqwjewoiujqorj

Trigger Happy wrote: »

I have an subscription to ancestry and have had for the last few weeks. But I have cancelled it as I really find it of little use as most of the searches I do give me a BMD index record which is the same as the mormons.
The other family trees on there are also of little use. The few that have looked usefull have turned out to be little more than guesswork (as admitted by the owners i contacted).
When you hit brick walls in your research you need more than guess work and BMD indices.

I would guess that whoever gets these records will implement a Scotish type model for viewing records. I am ok with that as long as they give you enough detail to avoid paying for non-relevant records.

On a seperate note it is good to see that there are now a good few sites, pay and free, that are working on graveyard records. There is a wealth of undocumented info out there that could open a lot of doors for us amateur slueths!

What did you make of the Irish Parish Registers on Ancestry.co.uk?


I don't have an Ancestry sub myself as all I would be interested in is Census records, and they usually have some of them free every so often.
A few weeks ago the US ones were free, and atm the 1911 UK one is free.

I hope they don't go the Scotland's People route, which in fact is very similar to Irish Roots.

You buy credits, eg 30 for 7 pounds. To just view a search costs 1 credit, and then to view any single result from the search costs 3 or 5 credits.

It's very good if you know exactly what you're searching as you do get to see the original BMD certs.
But it can become very expensive very quickly.


The free sites are very good.

One great site is Ellis Island which has ship manifests to New York. A great untapped resource.

Menas

eqwjewoiujqorj wrote: »

What did you make of the Irish Parish Registers on Ancestry.co.uk?

Well, in the areas I was searching in there were no parish registers on ancestry. My primary interests are Fermanagh/Monaghan/Leitrim and Cork.

Now for Cork I have partial parish records on Irishgenealogy.ie but frustratingly none for my descendants. Indeed the most frustrating brick wall I have is my great grandparents who married in cork in 1895. I have their marraige certs but cannot trace their families and births etc.
Apparently Monaghan records will be added 'soon' (ie some time in the undefined future) to Irishgenealogy.ie
For Fermanagh I depend on local transcriptions as storerd on www.claires-rosleaancestry.co.uk/records.htm as my family is from the Rosslea area.

Thanks for that Ellis island link, one area that I have never really gotten in to yet is what happened to those who dissapeared from my tree (ie, where I have births but no marraige or death) so the Ellis island link will come in handy!

shanew

post on JG's blog about this digitization project - see :

The National Library has bolted

interesting theory about the NLI possibly trying to force the situation by announcing this...

pinkypinky

The non-response to the comment asking for more information is interesting.