CULTURE SHOCK: Statemoney is being poured into two genealogy projects with very different roots and starkly contrasting results, writes Fintan O'Toole.
THE BIG MISTAKE we make about genealogy is to imagine that it is basically about tourism. It is Burt and Doris from Idaho looking up a forlorn Leitrim boreen for the great-great-great grandaunt who walked to Cobh in her bare feet in 1849 and survived the passage to the New World. But actually genealogy is about culture. It is a story.
As the great historian of the Irish diaspora, Donald Harman Akenson, writes in his fascinating recent book Some Family, "Genealogy - which is the most fundamental form of humanity's collective history - is best understood as narrative. And there is only one basic narrative that lies behind all literature, history . . . [ and] biology . . . someone, some living thing, is born, survives for a time, begets - maybe - and dies, certainly. We all need the sense of being part of a succession for our lives to be licit." The difference between genealogy in this sense and genealogy as an arm of the tourist trade is starkly obvious in two State-sponsored projects currently unfolding. To get a sense of genealogy in Akenson's sense, click on the website of the National Archives. Its Census Online project, www.census.nationalarchives.ie/, allows you to search the 1911 census for Dublin by name or street, and find a digital impression of the actual census form filled out by the head of the household. It is an extraordinarily moving thing to do.
The handwriting, the details of ages, occupations, education and dwellings, the ability to identify their neighbours and their community, all bring you into the presence of the dead. One of the most basic impulses of human culture - to contact the ancestors - is engaged.
It is very important that you can do this without anyone demanding a credit card number. The National Archives project is animated by a connection between public memory and public service, the idea of honouring a community's search for origins.
The Census Online project will expand to give the 1911 census for the whole country and then to the 1901 census. All of it will be free to use, because the National Archives developed an innovative partnership with the Library and Archives of Canada. The ability to deliver it efficiently, free of charge, and in a user-friendly way is testament to the fact that when people actually believe in the value of genealogy as a cultural resource, they can deliver a real benefit to the Irish public and the Irish diaspora.
There is, however, another State-backed genealogy project that is driven not by culture but by tourism. The Irish Genealogy Project has its roots in a 1988 government task force on tourism. In its own self-description, it is "a genuine opportunity to extend and upgrade genealogy as a tourism product." It has taken 20 years to develop a computerised database of family history sources, from parish registers, census forms and property records. In its first eight years alone, it took £15 million of public money, mostly from Fás, whose trainees did the work. In 1990, it was announced that the project would be finished in 1993. By 1996, only 30 per cent of the records had been digitised. Some of them were entered on computers that were not compatible with the main database.
It was only last month that the completion of the project was announced by Seamus Brennan and Martin McGuinness. It is now a cross-Border initiative, under the two governments and the Irish Family History Foundation, which brings together local genealogy groups. Its business is handled through an amalgamation of these public and civic groups with commercial genealogy companies to form an entity called Irish Genealogy Limited (IGL).
The stated function of IGL is not to make a public cultural resource available to the public that has paid for it but "to generate economic activity and employment throughout the island of Ireland by boosting roots tourism." Essentially, it is not for the Irish public at all, but for tourists. And it will be run as a commercial enterprise. A search for a single record such as a baptismal certificate will cost €30. Given the vagueness of the information with which many people start out on a genealogical search, and the number of searches often required before the right ancestor is located, "roots tourism" could be a very expensive business. But it is not at all clear how an online resource accessible from anywhere in the world actually contributes to tourism anyway.
The irony of these contrasting projects within the State sphere is that the one that came under a commercial rubric - IGL - looks like very bad value for the taxpayer, while the one that set out to achieve a cultural goal, Census Online, has been a model of the efficient and intelligent use of public resources. But even if this were not the case, there is still an overwhelming argument for genealogical information to be freely available online as a public cultural resource. Genealogy is history made personal - it connects people through their individual genetic past to the past of the communities they inhabit. And, in a society that is struggling with interculturalism, the State should encourage genealogy as an exercise in political hygiene. It has a nasty habit of surprising people and making them realise that they are not quite who they think they are. There are few more civilising experiences.