Is Rootsireland any good?

SeamusFX · 23-04-2018 8:38pm #1

Hi I'm not looking to slag off Rootsireland, but €225/year or €15 for one day seems very expensive, especially since many of the records are available elsewhere for free. I'm just looking for opinions of those that have used it, is it easy to use and is it worth it? I
Thanks!

L1011 · 23-04-2018 8:40pm

Its not easy to use and its not really worth it anymore - they have some records that don't exist elsewhere, but not a lot; and potentially better transcriptions on some records (but sometimes much worse).

srmf5 · 23-04-2018 9:10pm

I really like Roots Ireland. Whenever I want to use it I get the €30 subscription. It doesn't make sense to spend €15 just for a day. I don't have a yearly subscription since I'm not researching all the time. I generally get it during the summer months. I find its search database much easier to use than others. Maybe it's just because I'm used to it but I always found it great even when people complained about it before it had some improvements. The results that I want come up and I don't get results that clearly aren't what I'm looking for. Even though lots of church records are now up on other websites, I still get the subscription if I'm doing a lot of research because I find other databases more difficult to use to get what I want. It's easy to get the right family by limiting to county or parish. The names of sponsors and witnesses can also be searched now.

Thomas from Presence · 25-04-2018 12:01am

There are some serious issues with the quality of the transcriptions. A lot of the legacy data entry could do with being reinput again. Poor standards like recording age at death as 0 when it was simply unknown.

The name index is not the best way to identify surnames I think. If it had wildcard searching it would help here.

Where it really shines is the records from protestant churches particularly in border counties and over the border counties.

It's a good jumping-off point but if you're doing serious research I wouldn't rely entirely on the transcriptions but at least use them as a pointer.

pinkypinky · 25-04-2018 9:37am

Well, it would be fair to say that you should never just rely on transcriptions and always look at the original image where possible.

I do think Roots is worth a short-term subscription to see what you think yourself, but make sure first that it has records for the relevant area of interest.

We've discussed this a lot before so it's also worth using the search function to see earlier threads.

oceanclub · 05-05-2018 10:56pm

Does anyone know if RootsIreland work from the original registers? I can see the value of using them too if so, I've seen quite a few microfiche copies where the page is folded and so information is missing or wrong.

P.

pinkypinky · 06-05-2018 6:33pm

They did work from registers in churches.

Is Rootsireland any good?

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