RootsIreland / IFHF

shanew · 06-07-2012 11:02am

In addition I think some records were double transcribed by mistake.. sometimes with slight variation

S.

P. Breathnach · 06-07-2012 11:22am

shanew wrote: »

In addition I think some records were double transcribed by mistake.. sometimes with slight variation.

Indeed. I formed mental images of FÁS workers who had only a limited understanding of the process saying "Oh, shit. I did that one wrong. Better do it again."

I did find one instance of three copies of the same record. It was in irishgenealogy, so it did not lead to any costs for me.

RGM · 06-07-2012 11:27am

In my current purchases, I have identical records of three church baptisms, a church marriage, two civil marriages and a civil birth record. I also have two slightly different transcriptions of the same civil marriage record, one from the Galway East center and one from the Galway West, and two slightly different transcriptions of the same church marriage record from the same center.

That's NINE duplicate records. I didn't even realize it was that many. I'm gonna complain to them about it and demand credits. That's ridiculous.

shanew · 06-07-2012 11:31am

They had a note about possible duplicates somewhere on their website, and I have heard of people asking for, and receiving credits when this happens.

S.

RGM · 06-07-2012 11:39am

shanew wrote: »

They had a note about possible duplicates somewhere on their website, and I have heard of people asking for, and receiving credits when this happens.

S.

I'm sure they do, and I expected there to be errors. But nine? That's 225 credits!

shanew · 06-07-2012 9:04pm

shanew wrote: »

....Once you have narrowed down a parish you can then search within that for siblings by leaving the parents names and trying first letter of all names in turn - starting with the more common ones P, M, C, K, W, J etc
....

forget to include part 2 of this .... once you have a match by an initial, you can try adding a second letter, and see if you can keep the match count. If you do keep added more letters, if not rewind and try another one. Either all in order or by common patterns - e.g. if I get a match to P as an initial, I'd first try A as a 2nd on the basis that it could be Patrick or the equivalent in Latin. For M also try A for Mary/Maria/Matthew etc

Eventually like a game of hangman, you can usually work out the name. You can do the same process for brides or mother's names.

Shane

pedroeibar1 · 13-10-2012 12:19pm

Was on the Rootsireland site again - why is it that idiots run (ruin?) what could be Irelands best genealogy business?

My supposition last spring that their cash-flow would suffer from the pricing change probably is correct – they now are offering an advance payment plan for conferences a year away - in June & Sept 2013. No lecture topics, no lecturers names, and the offer of a stupid £20 discount on only one of them, a 2% (yes, two) reduction.:rolleyes:

As if that is not enough, they continue to lose the plot: a recent press release offers an advance purchase discount for a book fair – book now for £1 + a 50p booking fee and save on the door price of £2. Why bother??

Coolnabacky1873 · 14-10-2012 3:09pm

John Grenham has quite a humo(u)rous blog post this week about the recent addition of Roscommon records.

Coolnabacky1873 · 30-11-2012 7:29pm

Lately I've noticed with different parishes in different counties that the holdings of 'computerised' parish records goes beyond what is stated on the list of records for each parish.

So just an FYI to still search even if the parish records for the years you want do not seem to be on RootsIreland, according to the county pages.

As an example, I though I was going to have to get in contact with a particular Limerick parish as RootsIreland says they only have baptismal records up to 1879 but when I checked up popped all the ones I needed in the 1890s.

I won't even get started on the hundreds of free index credits I have and the dwindling record purchase credits!

Coolnabacky1873 · 03-02-2013 6:08pm

"Sanity returns to RootsIreland"

Blogger Christ Patton has an article saying that RootsIreland have gone back to the previous payment system they had!

http://britishgenes.blogspot.com/2013/02/sanity-returned-to-rootsireland.html

ACProctor · 03-02-2013 6:30pm

Thanks for this update. They're still comparatively expensive - especially given the difficulty with commonality and variant spellings of Irish names - but the issue Chris added about lack of source citations is a serious concern. I can't see how they might be unaware of the industry's focus and best-practices on poper citations.

RGM · 08-02-2013 6:48pm

Here's an issue I haven't heard about before: The Roots search system in regards to incomplete or illegible entries.

Roots has a list of all the surnames in their database. There you will find entries like "R?" and various other incomplete names. These don't show up in search results. Someone with exact info may still have use for such records, but they are inaccessible.

I wrote a complaint about it, but it wasn't from the e-mail address I used in my account so they declined to answer my question.

ACProctor · 08-02-2013 6:55pm

RGM wrote: »

I wrote a complaint about it, but it wasn't from the e-mail address I used in my account so they declined to answer my question.

How do you know that was the reason? Did they respond to you at all?

It would be a pretty silly excuse to avoid responding to an important issue like that, and it's an issue that might affect new users of their resource too.

RGM · 08-02-2013 7:08pm

ACProctor wrote: »

How do you know that was the reason? Did they respond to you at all?

It would be a pretty silly excuse to avoid responding to an important issue like that, and it's an issue that might affect new users of their resource too.

This is what I wrote:

When looking at the list of surnames in your database, it shows some incomplete entries like "R?" However, your search won't allow surname searches with less than three characters. This means that entries that are not completely legible (such as "R?") will not show in search results and can't be examined in any way.

What are you doing to address this problem?

Thanks,
XXXXX

This is the response I got:

Dear Mr. XXXXXX

You have not registered properly on the site. Please do so or we will delete your account. Please refer to our terms and conditions of use.

Yours sincerely
Customer Support
www.rootsireland.ie

Considering the vast number of records that Roots has transcribed, this is a significant problem. If you look through the surname list I've mentioned, you'll find that it's possible that a significant percentage of records are not accessible.

Coolnabacky1873 · 08-02-2013 8:42pm

That has to be one of the most spectacularly ignorant responses I have seen from "Customer Support"

Can you imagine if Ancestry or FMP responded to you like that.....of course they wouldn't.

If I ever win the lottery the first thing I will do is give the NLI the money to digitize the parish registers and put them online for free.

L1011 · 08-02-2013 9:11pm

Utterly unprofessional and frankly pathetic response. Will think twice about paying them (heftily) again for something I could probably find in the NLI.

RGM · 08-02-2013 9:30pm

Just a real quick example of what I'm talking about:

search results for M?
List of databases that are searchable No. of Records
Baptismal/Birth Records for Ireland 21
Marriage Records for Ireland 34
Burial/Death Records for Ireland 3
Census Records for Ireland 751
Gravestone Inscriptions for Ireland 3
Griffith's Valuation for Ireland 0
Irish Ship Passenger Lists 67
Census Substitutes for Ireland 1

But if you click on anything: "Please enter at least 3 characters in one of the Surname fields."

It's bad enough that there are entries recorded as "M---" or "M ?" that won't show up when you're searching for Maguire or McBride or whatever, but you can at least seek them out if you know the situation. "M?" is completely inaccessible.

The whole site is awful. It's frustrating, because I've found records there that aren't available anywhere else.

RootsIreland / IFHF

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