[pedroeibar1]

Point taken, Shane, but you are an ‘expert’ as clearly indicated by your regular posts both here and elsewhere; you know how to navigate around the better areas of that awful site and ‘pick & choose’ from it and others. The purpose of the IFI funding and State support for IFHF was to generate tourist revenue; now imagine Joe Schmo in NJ or MA, looking for info with a view to coming to Ireland to see the auld sod and the ‘Gathering’ ........he would run a mile after encountering the IFHF roots site.

Yes, IFHF are almost the only show in town, but once Aer Lingus was in a similar position. Look at what happened when Ryanair took to the skies. AL floatation price of €2.20, now priced artificially high at about €1, (mainly because of Ryanair bid interest) having been down to 0.63 this year and even lower a couple of years ago (their true value IMO). Why? Bad management, good staff without power and bad staff with attitude. Detect any similarities with IFHF?

[Coolnabacky1873]

Originally Posted by shanew

If there was an alternative for the more difficult searches (i.e, have names, but not the exact parish...) they would lose customers in droves, but as it stands we have no choice, so they dont have to live in the real commercial world. Common sense, and JG, would suggest that IFHF and IrishGenealogy combine forces, but I dont see that happening any time soon - hope I'm wrong.. The scanning of the RC films looked like an apparent way out of this, but somehow they were able to prevent this - dont get why they have this power ?

From the point of view of the IFHF I think this is the central issue. From what I have read on John Grenham's blog over the years and picket up from the professional genealogy community there seems to be two competing ideologies when it comes to records:

Get everything online for free (e.g. 1901/1911 census) vs. charge people for access using a poor imitation of the ScotlandsPeople model.

IFHF seem to think that it would be detrimental to their revenues if the NAI were able to scan the parish registers and get them online. I work as a pro genealogist and would LOVE to see ALL Irish records online for free. I (and therefore the IFHF) would still be able to get an income as it takes a long time to understand how and why various record sets were created and how many there are out there. Plenty of people are not willing to or don't have the time to invest in that kind of knowledge accumulation so will pay for it. If each county heritage centre got it's act together and actively targeted those with Kerry, Galway, Donegal etc.. roots in the US and elsewhere they would have a very good income stream.

[tenterfields]

Originally Posted by shanew

We the customers are in the unfortunate position of not having much alternative - unless you are lucky enough to be searching a parish included on IrishGenealogy then it's usually a case of either searching on IFHF or visiting the appropriate Library - that of course is if you know the parish or at at least the general area, and you were able to get to the source.

If there was an alternative for the more difficult searches (i.e, have names, but not the exact parish...) they would lose customers in droves, but as it stands we have no choice, so they dont have to live in the real commercial world. Common sense, and JG, would suggest that IFHF and IrishGenealogy combine forces, but I dont see that happening any time soon - hope I'm wrong.. The scanning of the RC films looked like an apparent way out of this, but somehow they were able to prevent this - dont get why they have this power ?

For the moment I have to say I tolerate the system but extract every last details I can out of the free search, even with the restrictions - i.e. the one with just number of results. This is tedious but can yield results if you have some names and a county at least.


Shane

Hi Shane

Any chance of a quick tutorial on wringing info from the free search for us neophytes?

[RGM]

I will say their database search has a couple serious flaws:

- You have to manually search for different name variations. A search for "Ryan" won't return results for "Royan," for example. When you're dealing with transcriptions that are all over the place, this is important. They should at least make it clear for people. I mean, I have Ring ancestors and I've found records under Ryng, Reing, Reiny and Reen. Your average Joe won't find that stuff.

- Can't search by locations within counties. So irritating.

If I was running that site from a business point of view, I'd make searches free and make it easy as hell to find what you're looking for, then put a price on the records. Otherwise, people will click around for two minutes, get frustrated and leave.


Also, I've come across duplicate records. That's ridiculous when you're paying for each one.

[shanew]

easier to use an example or two if you have some... like manual searches you need a certain level of clues, otherwise there's no way to confirm if you have a possible match. As well as the name, dob and county, you ideally need one or more of these :

parish or town

parents names..ideally both but one can be enough sometimes

siblings names and dates

The names make a big difference - common names you need more details, rare names you can sometimes get away with just a name, year and county. Some name variations and Latin versions are allowed for in the searches but you can also just enter the first few letters - e.g. Ja for James/Jacobus etc.

Baptism searches are much easier for RC families since they include mother's maiden name, CofI baptism generally dont. However the search facility on RootsIreland doesn't always work correctly for maiden name searches - think that might relate to certain counties or parishes...

For the actual baptism searches go to the relevant county section, and enter the basic details - and see how many matches there are. Fine tune the search by entering the first names of the father and/or mother if you have them and again check the number of matches. If you get a small number of results, then you can try each of the parishes in turn and note the number of matches in each. 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 (they dont allow a general search by parish without a name).

Basically the aim of this is to get to a search that gives you a small number of results, and ideally the message '1 match for the search criteria...' Once you have done this you can follow up by purchasing the record transcript(s), or better still viewing the film in the NLI. Obviously if you get a 'No records were returned', or a very a large number you are in trouble...and probably have to go back to your clues and see if you can add to these.

If you dont know the county then the process is more complex, but if you believe the person came from one of the areas covered by RootsIreland then you can try the "full" search with parents names and see if there are results - if so then de-select the various counties in turn until you narrow down where they are - then select the relevant county centre(s), and start the parish search.



S.

Re: Duplicates - some of these relate to baptism and civil births for the same person.

Re : Searching within county - you can search by parish, but an initial is required

[P. Breathnach]

Originally Posted by shanew

...
Re: Duplicates - some of these relate to baptism and civil births for the same person...

Where a Catholic parish has more than one church, the records in the "chapel of ease" should be regarded as a supplementary record, as they were supposed to be copied into the main parish register. It looks to me as if some of the chapel of ease records were also entered in the database.

[shanew]

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




S.

[P. Breathnach]

Originally Posted by shanew

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]

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]

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]

Originally Posted by shanew

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]

Originally Posted by shanew

....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]

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.

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]

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

[Coolnabacky1873]

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!