Members of the Ireland Branch Committee (pictured below) joined with others at yesterday's launch online of the General Register Office's historic civil registers.
A large group of who's who in Irish genealogy assembled in the foyer of the National Library in Dublin yesterday to celebrate the launch of General Register Office's historic civil registers. The event was jointly hosted by Ministers Leo Varadkar and Heather Humphreys, who both spoke. While Varadkar's Deparment of Social Protection has ultimate responsibility for the General Register Office, it is Heather Humphrey's Depmartment of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural & Gaeltacht Affairs that runs the website: www.irishgenealogy.ie
The registers represent a huge gift to those interested in researching their family history, dispensing with the need to visit the reading room on Werburgh St for most 19th century ancestors or pay for research copies of the registers. The index references remain on the site, so full legal copies may be ordered when necessary, but an image link has now been added, which opens as a pdf. Of note to historical researchers, we can now see the whole page and because of this, several people have already discovered a family member was a twin, by seeing an extra child before or after the relevant entry born to the same parents.
The site is not without flaws, and some early marriages and deaths have not yet been imaged, but we are assured they will be put up in due course. It currently shows register pages for the following periods:
Births: 1864 - 1915
Marriages: 1882 - 1940
Deaths: 1891 - 1965
Happy searching!
