Oh, and a special prize is awarded for "Disingenious Transcription"! The Irish Family History Federation has enjoyed a long monopoly on various different Church records from most of the counties of the Emerald Isle. When I first started my family history foraging I was very grateful for anything that I could find online for Ireland, but now I have become more and more frustrated with their query screens and, in this particular case, disingenious transcriptions that undoubtedly maximise their revenue but can only annoy customers paying their expensive prices.
Their query screens have remained largely unchanged for years now, other than to become more restrictive in terms of different combinations of criteria that can be queried at the same time. Having found a candidate marriage record recently, I wondered if I might learn fathers' names for the bride and groom. I tried a few likely names as extra query criteria but no joy. Wondering whether any fathers' names had been transcribed at all, I entered just their surnames and the record returned successfully from the index, indicating to me that there must be fathers' names present. I went ahead and bought the record at 5 Euros (ouch!) and was very annoyed to see that there could not have been any fathers' names on the original record but that the transcriber had decided to replicate just the bride and groom's surnames in those query fields for good measure!
I must have spent £100's playing "letterbox Scrabble" on the IFHF site over the years and on buying more wrong records than right ... and they are all transcripts not even original images! Oh, and don't think you can go back and look at something you've already paid for some time later, as your privilege to do so times out and you have to buy it again! I wish I'd spent the money on a flight to Dublin and researched the church archives myself. To be fair to the IFHF, I'm sure marshalling the resources of the various entrenched County Archives is like herding cats, but they are not keeping up with delivering better customer services and value for money. For example, given Ireland's ecclesiastical past, being able to query by religious denomination ought to be one of the most basic query criteria you can start with for church records, but no you have to drop down to the relevant county website and query every single parish in turn, but only if you actually know the person's full name! I can't wait for PRONI's new system to be launched which is promising to be much more like ScotlandsPeople with far more reasonable prices for index queries and record purchases. IFHF take note!
Their query screens have remained largely unchanged for years now, other than to become more restrictive in terms of different combinations of criteria that can be queried at the same time. Having found a candidate marriage record recently, I wondered if I might learn fathers' names for the bride and groom. I tried a few likely names as extra query criteria but no joy. Wondering whether any fathers' names had been transcribed at all, I entered just their surnames and the record returned successfully from the index, indicating to me that there must be fathers' names present. I went ahead and bought the record at 5 Euros (ouch!) and was very annoyed to see that there could not have been any fathers' names on the original record but that the transcriber had decided to replicate just the bride and groom's surnames in those query fields for good measure!
I must have spent £100's playing "letterbox Scrabble" on the IFHF site over the years and on buying more wrong records than right ... and they are all transcripts not even original images! Oh, and don't think you can go back and look at something you've already paid for some time later, as your privilege to do so times out and you have to buy it again! I wish I'd spent the money on a flight to Dublin and researched the church archives myself. To be fair to the IFHF, I'm sure marshalling the resources of the various entrenched County Archives is like herding cats, but they are not keeping up with delivering better customer services and value for money. For example, given Ireland's ecclesiastical past, being able to query by religious denomination ought to be one of the most basic query criteria you can start with for church records, but no you have to drop down to the relevant county website and query every single parish in turn, but only if you actually know the person's full name! I can't wait for PRONI's new system to be launched which is promising to be much more like ScotlandsPeople with far more reasonable prices for index queries and record purchases. IFHF take note!