Woo-hoo - just 10 weeks to go! Following on from my earlier thread: http://www.familytreeforum.com/showt...olic-ancestors!
the launch date for the Catholic Parish Register Digitisation Project has just been announced earlier today: the NLI's collection of Catholic Parish register microfilms will be made freely available online on a dedicated website from Wednesday 8 July 2015.
From my experience of laboriously trawling through the microfilms in Dublin, the parish registers include information such as the dates of baptisms and marriages, and the names of the key people involved, eg parents' names on baptisms, fathers' names on marriages, godparents or witnesses - but not always - sometimes the record keeping leaves a lot to be desired in terms of completeness and legibility. Plus, as noted in the earlier thread, you may have to contend with faded ink, stained and blackened paper, spidery handwriting etc and brush up on some basic Latin - although that's usually pretty straightforward, as the wording usually follows set forms.The digitisation is of the images on microfilm rather than the original registers so I am not sure how much they will have been able to clean them up, if at all.
NB The digital images of the registers will be searchable by parish location only, and will not be transcribed or indexed by the NLI so you will need to know where your ancestors hailed from.
Still, despite the caveats above, it's still brilliant news - freely available without the expense of a trip to Dublin, the chance to revisit the records for all the stuff you inevitably miss first time round, hopefully also the ability to print out and save records - what's not to like?
There's more info in the NLI press release here:
The countdown begins...
Christine
the launch date for the Catholic Parish Register Digitisation Project has just been announced earlier today: the NLI's collection of Catholic Parish register microfilms will be made freely available online on a dedicated website from Wednesday 8 July 2015.
From my experience of laboriously trawling through the microfilms in Dublin, the parish registers include information such as the dates of baptisms and marriages, and the names of the key people involved, eg parents' names on baptisms, fathers' names on marriages, godparents or witnesses - but not always - sometimes the record keeping leaves a lot to be desired in terms of completeness and legibility. Plus, as noted in the earlier thread, you may have to contend with faded ink, stained and blackened paper, spidery handwriting etc and brush up on some basic Latin - although that's usually pretty straightforward, as the wording usually follows set forms.The digitisation is of the images on microfilm rather than the original registers so I am not sure how much they will have been able to clean them up, if at all.
NB The digital images of the registers will be searchable by parish location only, and will not be transcribed or indexed by the NLI so you will need to know where your ancestors hailed from.
Still, despite the caveats above, it's still brilliant news - freely available without the expense of a trip to Dublin, the chance to revisit the records for all the stuff you inevitably miss first time round, hopefully also the ability to print out and save records - what's not to like?
There's more info in the NLI press release here:
The countdown begins...
Christine
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