News from the Genealogical Society of Ireland: Cumann Gein ealais na hEireann un Laoghaire Genealogical Society, is proposing something that should interest people from all over the State.
Its honorary secretary, Mr Michael Merrigan, has been in touch to discuss the records of the General Register Office in Dublin. The society has sent a note to the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, suggesting that people who wish to find their roots should be enabled to do so without necessarily having to travel to Dublin. You might call this an information technology exchange and, given the use of modern computers, why not? The society has asked Mr Cowen to leave the General Register Office with its core function as register, certification authority and custodian of documents relating to births, deaths and marriages in the Republic but is also asking that the Dublin-based public search room, in Lombard Street East, should download its files to regional-repositories.
Why should people have to travel to Dublin to seek out records when the appropriate files could be whizzed to any point in the State with a computer terminal within seconds?
The General Register Office was established in Dublin under the Civil Registration (Ireland) Acts, 1844 and 1863, and the public search rooms have seen an unprecedented demand in recent years. Overcrowding and delays have been the result.
What to do? Under the principle of "public ownership and right", it is now proposed that microfilm records should be made available free of charge in the regional archives or county libraries in Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford.
"Further consideration should be afforded to extending access to these records in regional centres in the west, north-west, north-east and in the cities of Derry and Belfast," Mr Merrigan says.
He adds, by the way, that the "roots" industry is quite substantial, particularly in the case of Irish-Americans who combine their vacation here with a hankering to find where their ancestors came from. Wouldn't it be good if they could log on locally - wherever they were in Ireland - and access the records?
A point not to be missed is that, instead of going to a central location in Dublin, visitors wanting to know more about their past would spend a lot more money in the locality that interested them. There is potential here for a cyber/roots industry.
Long before computers, our American friends were coming here, writing to the newspapers and trying to find out what the derivation of their names meant. They had to rely on local folklore. Often too, in a scampish way, they got exactly what they were asking for, meaning that if their great-great-grandfather O'Grady was supposed to have been a Waterford or Limerick man - that's exactly what he turned out to be. The new regime is going to give people more access to the records - verifiable ones - and there will be microfilm copies. Access to these records in Dublin is currently a frustrating exercise for the public, many of whom are visitors to the country in search of their "roots".
"The system employed involves searching indexes on payment of a fee and obtaining photocopies of entries on the payment of another fee," Mr Merrigan says.
"Current fees are £1.50 for a search of any consecutive period of either births, marriages, or deaths; £12 for a daily search of all, and £1.50 per photocopy ordered."