RootsIreland mistranscriptions and errors

[Sinann]

I was just reading the email RootsIreland sent today re Antrim records
It includes this
"In Magheralin Church of Ireland register the minister Canon B.W Dolling had to add the following note to the baptismal record of Mary Anne in 1808:

'The parents of said child went away while I was registering the others, though desired to stay and I have not been able to discover who they were'."

[Sinann]

It sure would Alison.
You were very lucky to meet that priest. That wouldn't happen too often these days.
25 euro now to look at parish records in a church I think, if they will even let you near them.
The state is quite happy to put what it has up for free, but the churchs give it to pay sites.

[Elwyn Soutter]

I agree about priests and Ministers not always welcoming genealogical research. I know a couple who simply ignore such requests, saying they simply haven’t the time to deal with them. As one put it to me “my priority to my living parishioners, not the dead ones.”

The snag with digitizing the records is that it is a mammoth task, and would cost a lot of money. Who exactly is going to pay for that? Would it really be a good use of taxpayers money? If it is ever done, you can be sure the records won’t be free to access.

[Alison55]

I have no doubt that several organizations would salivate at the opportunity to digitize those parish records and then sell subscriptions to access them, as is done now with many records.  If the churches in question were not comfortable with those organizations, I also have no doubt that private money could be raised for this project from the world-wide Irish diaspora.  There are a lot of deep pockets out there--and people who would be willing to make smaller donations.

[Sinann]

What your saying makes sense but IFHF is non profit making and has access to these records. We can complain all we like about how well they do the job but at least they are doing it, a commercial company would no doubt charge us even more and there is no guarantee they would do any better. The government isn't going to set up another records collecting organisation when there already is one in place that costs them nothing.

Than there is the question of who would be willing to take this work away from the local heritage centres who to be fair started gathering the data into one place to begin with. They also have the backing of the State and an established relationship with local churchs.

What I can't get my head around is why they don't make copy's of the registers, they only do transcriptions, that way we could look at the original image and see for ourselves.
I know back when they started this wouldn't have been as easy or cheap as now, but they should at least make a start with the ones they are doing now.

All this chat has made me read the IFHF website in more detail and while it still wrecks my head and I wish it was more consistent and fulfilled its stated standards better, I'm beginning to appreciate the amount of work it has done a lot more.

Still charging for searching will always be a sore point.

[Alison55]

Allow me to give you one example of the poor job IFHF/RootsIreland does.  Using a baptismal cert I have already bought from them and know the info to be in their database, I just searched for the same info with the father's first name spelled Matthew, the usual spelling in the US and many other places.  No results. When I enter Mathew, the traditional Irish spelling, bingo, there is the record.  That is a disgrace.

I could supply many more examples but will not try your patience further.

If an organization is doing a poor job, the market will seek another source--or disappear.  As for the heritage centers, I suspect if people could actually find their ancestors more easily, the heritage centers would be very busy indeed.

[Sinann]

I don't understand why that is a disgrace.

[Alison55]

Sorry not to be clearer. It is a disgrace that their search function is so limited that it won't show results for Mathew/Matthew but only one or the other. And that there is no wild card function like Mat*.  I tried that too.

The site is way behind the tech curve and it drives away all but the most determined.

[hasta]

Ireland's RC registers to be digitised
http://irish-genealogy-news.blogspot.ie/2012/09/irelands-rc-registers-to-be-digitised.html
Haven't heard any more on this since.