Fantastic Find! Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury

The fire that destroyed the Public Records Office in Dublin in June of 1922 with the resulting loss of centuries of Irish records has made researching our Irish ancestors difficult.

[Source: Trinity College, Dublin]

But now, five institutions* have joined together to search out duplicates of the original records in other collections to"recreate virtually as much of the archive as possible in a digital format that can be accessible to everybody" in time for the centenary of the fire.**

The project is called Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury and its director Peter Crooks*** explains:

“We are committed to producing 50 million words of searchable material by 2022 and that is possible with the artificial intelligence we are using,” he said. 

“Tens of thousands of papers will be digitised, but they will also be searchable, which is a change. We will be able to mine this information for individual names.”

I strongly suggest you visit Trinity College Dublin's website about the project, especially the Gallery which has a number of images and videos, including a 1922 newsreel that shows the Public Records Office on fire.

I learned about Beyond 2022 through a link to the this article in the Irish Times.

*They are: the National Archives, the UK national archives, the public records office in Northern Ireland, the Irish Manuscripts Collection and the library at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
**Which happened on June 30, 1922, two days after the start of the Irish Civil War.
**You can watch a video with Peter Crooks here.

© 2019 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Saturday Night Free Webinar: John Grenham presents "Why are Irish records so weird?"

Seriously, why are they so weird?  Let's find out why in John Grenham's "Why are Irish records so weird?":

Not all Irish records were destroyed in 1922, but the burning of the Public Record Office in that year did leave an immense gap. As a result, Irish genealogical research has to deal with idiosyncratic, fragmentary and sometimes marginally relevant records in ways that can seem very strange to those used to British, US or Australian sources. In addition, Ireland came late to digitization and has done it unsystematically. To be polite. This talk unravels the ways in which marginal records have become essential for Irish research, and the peculiarities in using them online.

Available to non-subscribers at Legacy Family Tree Webinars through March 23, 2017.  1 hour 28 minutes.



© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Irish Genealogy Webinar: "Using Findmypast to Unlock Your Irish Ancestry" presented by Brian Donovan

I don't appear to have any recent Irish ancestors, but most other researchers I know do.


Brian Donovan, the Global Head of Irish Collections at findmypast.com, presents "Using Findmypast to Unlock Your Irish Ancestry:"

There are over 100 million unique Irish genealogical records at findmypast.com, by far the largest collection anywhere online. But using them well is the subject of this talk. Brian will talk through the many collections available online, focusing on those records which are most valuable for Irish research.

Originally recorded on August 24, 2016 (1 hour 51 minutes) 

Note: Researcher John Grenham has a Foundations of Irish Genealogy (6 part series) at Legacy Family Tree Webinars (for subscribers).

Some past posts that Pat has done already on Irish genealogy:
Fantastic Find: Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland
Fantastic Find: Irish Genealogical Research Society's Early Irish Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes






© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Great News for Irish Ancestry Research!

[Source: Vintage Holiday Crafts at http://vintageholidaycrafts.com/st-patricks-day-vintage-greeting-cards-shamrocks/]

Through a recent post on MassLive.com, we discovered that the National Library of Ireland recently announced that they expect to put 390,000 parish records online by the summer of 2015.

"There will be no charge to access the information, mainly baptismal and marriage records, that dates between the 1740s and the 1880s, and includes some 1,091 parishes throughout Ireland. The Catholic Church allowed the library to make microfilm copies of the information, in the 1950s, and the information is considered vital to any historical research, as census records from this period were destroyed, when the Four Courts building, housing the Public Records Office, was destroyed by fire in 1922, during the Irish Civil War."

The MassLive post also includes other online resources for researching Irish ancestors,

© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.