Hot on the heels of the changes to the National Archives website, the other main state portal for genealogical research has had a refresh. ETA: 27/2 – several of the issues that I noted below are now fixed! Hence, I’ve removed or edited my comments. Last week, I was in touch with IrishGenealogy to ask…
Hot on the heels of the changes to the National Archives website, the other main state portal for genealogical research has had a refresh.
ETA: 27/2 – several of the issues that I noted below are now fixed! Hence, I’ve removed or edited my comments.
Last week, I was in touch with IrishGenealogy to ask about the new year of records (we’re awaiting 1924 births, 1949 marriages and 1974 deaths) and if there was an update regarding the old death images for 1864-1870. This was the response I received (not signed with a person’s name) – I certainly wasn’t expecting a new website 4 days later.
This email addresses one of the main points I’ve seen mentioned on social media today: they aren’t loading the new year’s releases until they’ve tested the platform fully. They also blame the GRO for not getting the early deaths out, which is funny, because when I last asked the GRO, they blamed the Dept who controls IrishGenealogy.ie!
The new site has a fresh clean look and it works properly on mobile devices. The old site had two different landing pages for civil or church records but now they are combined into one search box. While this is neater, you do have to click more times to get to your search results. It’s also not as clear for a beginner what these different things mean. It’s still necessary to put initials in the Section 61 legislation getaround but there’s no annoying captcha anymore. The advanced options section brings more filters.
However, the bottom two of these (witness and sponsor) only pertain to the religious records, so it won’t show you witness on a civil marriage. This needs to be better defined.
Location is still by Superintendent Registrar District – I had hoped they’d change this to county. Not everyone understands when they put Cork in the box, that they’re only getting results from one of 18 districts in Co. Cork. Typing Dublin still brings up Dublin, Dublin North and Dublin South though. There also seems to be some coding error with Carrick on Shannon and Carrick on Suir, which I’m sure can be easily ironed out. In the help section, they rely on an external source for a map, which feels lazy, even though John Grenham’s map is excellent: IG should be producing their own map on the site directly.
After you’ve put in the search parameters, the results come a default of 10 but can be changed to 20 or 50 or 100 (this last has been added after my initial review went out). The filters are unchanged (by event, district or century).
Clicking on a birth return for 1902 from the above list brings a new page and a link to the image, which worked fine for me, but some people are reporting errors of the wrong record being linked. The pdf now opens in a new tab.
But if you click on a 19th century birth from the same set of results, you lose detail, as it no longer even displays the year of birth. The mother’s birth name was not in the index in the 19th century. This used to show “N/R” for not recorded and now says null. Hopefully this loss of detail is a glitch.
Something else I hope is a glitch is the additional spouse name in the advanced options, which right now is returning no results for marriages that exist.
When I first did this review, the death indexes were missing the age at death, as below.
But I’m happy to report this has been fixed (27/2).
And also what showed before with the lost of index reference and age at death, etc, has now been fixed too! You can see the before and after below.
The Genealogical Help section is much improved with lots of links and resources both on and offline.
Moving on to the church records section, here the witnesses and sponsors section does work in the advanced search but I did find in sample results that images are missing. This is also presumably a temporary thing they’ll iron out, but a nice addition is where there never was an image (for example, in St Andrew’s Westland Row), they now link you to the National Library’s image collection.
Similar to the census site, all the URLs have changed, so if you had saved a pdf link, it now doesn’t work. Personally, I didn’t tend to save these links. I crop the image and then copied the reference into a Word document when I’m searching, but I know a lot of people will be very unhappy about this. A Rootschat user has found a workaround here.
I hope this review is useful: I’ll add to it as I find more and do further testing. Please let me know if you find something and want me to share.
