RootsIreland mistranscriptions and errors

[little annie]

Are the mistake's genuine which I reckon they are !!! but doe's not help if copied wrong as that would lead to a lot of chasing the wrong records & cost the customer lots of money .
 

[monemore]

I have bought many records from IFHF in the past as I am seldom able to visit the NLI .  I only buy records when I am pretty sure that I have the correct one (lucky that the surname is not so common).  However, I did buy a record last year for a "Blackburn" but in actual fact the surname was clearly written as "Black"!  I found this out eventually when I had the chance to visit the NLI.  I got in touch with IFHF Limerick and advised them of this error and other minor errors that I had come across, in case others are chasing the same records.  They replied quickly and thanked me for the details and credited me for the incorrect record. 

Some of the records on the parish registers are nearly impossible to read so some mistranscriptions are inevitable but surely a mistaken year/date of record should be easier to spot.

[Alison55]

IFHF has been a huge gripe of mine. I have spent a great deal of money and I have indeed found some gold.  But the misspellings and errors on the site have caused me to waste so much money that I don't use it nearly as much as I would if they were more accurate.  Especially now that they charge for even searching.

In addition to everything else, many of their transcriptions don't include the full information on the record. I found this out during my one and only trip to Ireland and chance to look at the actual microfilm at the National Library in Dublin.  Baptism records include the names of the godparents, often vital clues to a family.  But the IFHF transcriptions usually do not have that info.

Their records of what they have are also inaccurate.  They don't mention that there may be a gap in the parish records of ten years or so, as I discovered after throwing a lot of money away.  There is also no way of learning, as I did the hard way, that parish boundaries can cross county lines. So I was searching for my Meath family when their records were in a Westmeath parish.

The Irish economy is in trouble.  Why don't they digitize all these parish records and put them online either free or for a reasonable fee?  The askaboutireland site for the censuses is terrific. Why not the same thing for parish records?  It would be a huge boost to tourism if people could more easily find out where they are from.

[Sinann]

The Census both of them
The Applotment books
and the Will index are free on the National Archives
Griffiths Valuation is free
The Down Survey is free
There are free headstone sites
The new WWI memorial book is free
The Military Archives stuff is free
The index on FamilySearch is free and the new one will also be free
am I missing anything?
We get a lot of free stuff.

[Alison55]

First, I don't mind paying if the info is accurate and correctly transcribed and indexed. So often not true of the IFHF.

Second, for the many millions of us who are the descendants of the Famine diaspora of the 1840s and 50s, most of the records you list are unfortunately not helpful. 

Griffith's is the best but many Irish never made it to that list. 

The Tithe Applotments transcription has been a disaster tho still can be worth the frustrating search. It does not even have parishes in the right county or the right names of parishes. And again, many Irish never made it at all to the TA.

The civil records generally begin in 1864 and so do not include the million and more Irish who emigrated before that date.

Gravestones are also few for the Famine generation and earlier. And of course later records such as those of WW1 are rarely of use for this generation.

The single most important source for pre-1864 Ireland is those parish records--and it is very, very difficult to get at them.  Digitize from the original parish books! Start a fund--I'd be the first to contribute.

[Sinann]

They don't include the people who didn't emigrate as well so we are all in the same boat on that score.
I'm not defending IFHF.
I'm just saying we do get a lot of stuff for free.
When you list it off like that, it's quite surprising.

[Oliverd]

Its not just one site its all of them.

I have found by and large they are accurate but have found misspellings abound and have on occasions used slight variations of a place name i.e. In Dublin......Lusk has been written as Rusk and Rush as Lush etc etc.

Even census I found transscribed incorrectly as it was just someone who decided name was same as others even though it wasn't even close.

Even with the best records a degree of caution is always required....

I remember seeing a survey that showed in one country that it was reckoned 1 in 10 children were being brought up by someone who assumed he was their biological father when it wasn't the case. This could make "interesting" family trees 

[Elwyn Soutter]

I regularly work with copies of the parish records held in PRONI in Belfast. Whilst some are easy documents to read, many are not. The handwriting is often terrible, pages have faded, extra entries squeezed in, in the margins and at the bottom of pages etc etc. Many are damaged by water or ink or are torn. Pages are lost. And so on. It can be extremely difficult to read some entries clearly. Many RC entries are in latin.  So there is no way that mistakes and misunderstandings can be eliminated from the records even if they were all computerised  afresh. The only advice I can give is to use the IFHF site as a guide and a search tool, but verify everything against the original entries if you can.

Good record keeping wasn’t really much of a priority in 19th century Ireland. I looked up Drumgooland Church of Ireland records recently, and there’s a note in them saying: “The entries of baptisms from this date 2nd Jun 1833 were made from papers collected by me J. A. Bears, lying about the church and vestry room and put in this book after I received it from … Thos I. Tighe at Parsons Hill on my becoming curate of the parish 1837.” That probably tells you all you need to know about the standards of record keeping that sometimes prevailed in the 18th & 19th centuries. It was evidently haphazard at times, and consequently many early records are lost.

[Alison55]

Everything you say is true, Elwyn.  But I searched records on microfilm for a Westmeath parish at the NLI in Dublin.  In addition to all the problems you describe, pages were out of order and upside down.  The microfilm itself was not in the best condition and the machines were ancient. They did not even print--I had to take notes, shades of my long-ago college days.

Several days later, I was at the parish itself. The priest kindly allowed me to examine the actual book.  Bad as it was--1840s & 50s--the information was much clearer and more legible.  Digitizing and making the images available online for fee or free would be the greatest contribution Ireland could make to its own history, I believe.  Parish records tell everyone's story, even the very poorest and those who might otherwise be completely anonymous.  They live on in those records.

It would contribute to the economy as well.  Most people, present company excepted of course, get frustrated and abandon family history when they hit that brick wall. There is a huge tourism opportunity being wasted. Ireland is more than the Ring of Kerry and the Cliffs of Moher or the Giants' Causeway.  People want to stand where their family once lived. There is no feeling like it. Digitize those images!