You will no doubt have gathered from my last 2 posts that I think that the Irish Family History Federation need to be offering considerably better value for money and that Ancestry releasing some Irish Catholic registers has been a brilliant personal revelation. 

So, I had to have a good chortle along with Chris Paton on reading his newsletter report on the latest hissy fit brewing in the Republic on the potential consequences of the Ancestry initiative.  Apparently, nothing short of monopolisitic domination of the market is predicted ... so, tell me what have the IFHF had for years?!  And will someone please enlighten me as to why the excellent Dept. of the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Irish Genealogy site cannot be expanded to cover more counties?  BTW, have you tried to order a BMD certificate from Roscommon recently?  Have your groats handy and the carrier pigeon to get them there!  The Irish Government I'm sure will claim that improvements all cost money they don't have, but what about developing their own strategy for reaching out to the huge Irish diaspora in conjunction with different commerical partners?

I agree with Chris Paton - if Ancestry can deliver a large "toe in the hole" to Irish genealogy market, then as a frustrated consumer, I am all for the competition delivering me better choice and value for money. 

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!

"... first it killed the Romans and now it's killing me!"  The old schoolboy lament found scrawled on many a desk apparently.  However you are going to have to brush up on your inflected endings and Latin forms of forenames if you are to make the most of some fantastic new Irish Catholic resources recently released by Ancestry.  Selected registers of baptisms, confirmations, marriages and burials dating from the end of the 18th century through to the beginning of the 20th are now available to query, and best of all are accompanied by images for the most part too.  Although only for selected parishes (see their Learn More... screens for each source to see which RC parishes are covered) this is a huge step forward for anyone with Roman Catholic Irish ancestors, especially this genealogist who has become increasingly frustrated at the expensive poor quality monopoly enjoyed to date by the Irish Family History Foundation on such resources (see later post.)

I recommend that you query by family surname and place only to begin with as quite a lot of the registers, and the resulting indexes, are in Latin.  Many forenames are recognisable (Thoman, Patricium, Margueritam) but others will have you dredging up your 1st year Latin e.g. Jacobi/Jacobo/Jacobum = James.  I found an excellent page online from the Lancashire Online Parish Clerks that gives hints and translations for the more common names.  And be sure to scrutinise any images yourself quite carefully rather than just rely on any transcription - "Joannem filium ex" is "John son of" versus "Joannam filiam ex" is "Joanna daughter of".

As you might expect, some of the transcription has proved quite challenging and you might have to hunt hard for some ancestors.  For example, if the person you are looking for has a 2 part forename, the second part may end up as their surname in the index e.g. Saram Annan is Sarah Ann.  If you are looking for siblings, then I recommend using shortened forms of the parents names and wildcards to cope with any parish clerks errant latin inflections and/or transcription errors.  For example, Jac* should find all the different forms of James listed above.  Using these techniques I have joyfully found not only 4 older brothers for my great grandmother but have also been able to use this information to track down a strong candidate for her parents' marriage much earlier than I had previously looked.

One of my Irish cousins shared the following funny post with me which he believes originated here, but may appear in lots of other places too, so my apologies if I have not acknowledged the proper original copyright.  My cousin and I have also been inspired to add a few of our own variations too, so long may we all have a laugh at the thought of the trouble our cantakerous ancestors may have inadvertently put us to centuries later!

" It is New Year's Eve 1852 and our ancestor sits at his desk by candlelight, pen poised, mulling over his resolutions for the coming year;

1.  No man is truly well-educated unless he learns to spell his name in at least 3 different ways within the same document.  Therefore I resolve to give the appearance of being extremely well-educated whenever I am required to sign my name to anything in the coming years.  If it was good enough for Shakespeare/Shakspeer/Shooglestick, it's good enough for me.

2.  My age is no-one's business but my own.  I hereby resolve never to list the same age or birth year twice on any document and reserve the right to consistently shave years off my age at every census until I end up younger than my eldest child.

3.  I resolve to see to it that all my children will have the same names as my ancestors have used for six generations in a row. 
My brothers promise to do likewise, thereby ensuring that each of our children has the same name as the cousins of the approximate same age in the same parish naturally.

4.  I resolve to have each of my children baptised in a different church - faith or parish, I'll pick and choose whichever one I like at the time.  I also reserve the right not to baptise all of them and if the itinerant minister keeps no records, that's no fault of mine.

5.  I will make every effort to reside in counties and towns where no vital records are maintained or where the courthouse burns down every few years.

(Or more particularly, I resolve to come from Ireland, where there are no records, or, if there are, they can only be examined by visiting the exact village and pleading with the local clergy, who is hostile to anyone not of his belief, which, of course, you are, and/or handing over a fee equal to or exceeding your yearly income for one hour's research, which may not find anything.)

6.  I resolve to move to a new town / county / country at least once every 10 years - can't be doing with that pesky enumerator asking silly questions.

(Or my own favourite variation on this one based on the actual life of one of my ancestors cousins - I resolve to move to at least 2 different countries other than that of my birth, have 2 different families, name my daughter with exactly the same 3 names as her cousin born in the same year in the same Australian state ... and eventually leave them all down under and bugger off back to Ireland to die in obscurity!)

7.  I resolve to join an obscure religious cult that does not believe in record-keeping or in participating in military service.

8.  When the tax collector comes to the door, I will lend him my pen which has been dipped in rapidly fading blue ink.

9.  I resolve that if my beloved wife, Mary, should die, I will marry another Mary (Anne/Susan/Elizabeth/Jane, delete as appropriate.)

10.  I resolve not to make a will.  Who needs to spend money on a lawyer?!"

Feel free to add your own additions and variations!

I recently shared some hard won information with a far flung online contact who had previously been kind enough to share information and precious photographs with me.  No sooner had I done so when the information was suddenly "published", complete with a few new "errors", in the online family tree of a relation of his that he obviously had permission to edit, but without so much as a "by your leave"!  Sadly he has chosen not to respond when asked why he did this which makes me feel both disappointed and more than a little angry. Time to examine why and think about how genealogy throws up these ethical dilemmas from time to time.

This is not the first time this has happened to me.  I had previously shared information with someone who seemed to share ancestors with me.  Again this was published online but crucially she made assumptions about other events and published these too.  So, now I have to remember to ignore her online tree because it's full of guesses.  It does annoy me when people make mistakes and take diabolical liberties with my research but once it's out there, you have no editorial control.

However, I have to admit that early in my people puzzling days I was delighted to come across a huge family tree that seemed to contain many of my ancestors and gladly traded information with the owner.  It turned out it was not his own original research but instead "copied" from a cousin (whom I have since met and is an outstanding researcher) and into which he had introduced errors and was not remotely interested in citing sources or evidence.  In fact, he turned out to be what I have termed a "TD Genie" - not so much interested in the quality of his family tree but more the quantity - 10K plus names and rising in their ancestral Telephone Directories!

Now, myself and 2 other skilled genies are sat on a veritable goldmine of information that we have gathered for a particular surname in Ireland as we have attempted to unravel the bits that we think belong to our branches of the family.  I want to share this information with the wider community as it is solid research that others may benefit from, but I'm feeling cautious about doing so.

I once read that family history reseachers are somewhat looked down upon by traditional historical academia as we are viewed as "selfishly" keeping our research to ourselves and not publishing it to peer review.  But how do you keep control of your research in the free-for-all that exists with online family trees and stop it being misquoted and bastardised?  I know people do use online family trees as a way of being able to access their data remotely, but perhaps we could lobby the companies that host the data to give us an option of labelling information as "estimated" or "copied" so that true original research can be clearly identified?  There is an option to cite sources but so few people seem to do this.

I would just like to end with an uplifting story though.  Ancestry usefully flags up other users who have looked at the same records you have viewed.  Through this facility, someone contacted me to query my interest in a rather grand Russian emigre whom I had researched as part of my St Peter's Memorial Home project (see earlier post.)  I was able to give her new information which enriched a chapter of her family history.  So, I live in hope that one day, someone will do this for me, but I suppose that will only happen if I am brave enough to publish more of my research online and grit my teeth when others hoover it up unattributed and mangle it as they see fit.  What do you think?