Friday 20 December 2013

Exclusive: Christmas is delayed

For those awaiting the upload of the General Register Office's working version of the Irish Civil Registration Indexes to IrishGenealogy.ie, I'm sorry to report that you're not going to see it this side of Christmas.

I'm told that the project is still going ahead, just a little later than was planned. As is the way with such delays, no one wants to put a date to the likely upload in case the deadline is missed a second time, but I get the impression that the delay is likely to be a matter of weeks rather than months.

In the same delayed mode are the West Cork RC records I mentioned back in October. And I have a confession to make in this regard. I incorrectly advised in my Back To Our Past report that the records of 20 West Cork parishes were going to be added to the site. It seems I need to either improve my note-taking or get my ears syringed! The unravelled truth is that there are 20,000 records for a number of Roman Catholic parishes in West Cork ready for upload. Some of these parishes are already represented on the site, but the new additions provide register entries for later dates. For example, baptism records for Ballymodan (Bandon) are currently on the free site for the period 1793-1822; the awaited upload will extend the dates to 1880.

There will also be a small upload of records for St Michael's parish, Dublin.

As to the promised uploads from the National Archives, I am still trying to find out what's happening. While time is running out for pre-Christmas delivery of the two awaited collections – the 1821–1851 census fragments and census search forms record sets – I am mindful that in 2008 the NAI made a very late and unexpected upload of the 1911 census for counties Antrim, Down and Kerry on 22 December.

I could say that it's only the 20th today, but I'll admit that my optimism levels are barely registering on the positivityometer! Perhaps it's best to start looking forward to 2014!