County Clare Records

[margaretspearin]

If you are looking for family in Clare and are having problems finding records please sign this petition. County Clare are well behind all other Counties in Ireland with regard to viewing records online and every where else. We who live in the County can't access these records here. You the diaspora think it is hard for you to get hold of your ancestors records, well it is equally as difficult for us who live here to access the appropriate documents.
Please sign below
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/cou ... cords.html

Margaret Spearin

[mcreed]

Margaret, have you not seen all the Clare records online at the Clare Library website? http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... nealog.htm

[Paddy Casey]

County Clare are well behind all other Counties in Ireland with regard to viewing records online and every where else. We who live in the County can't access these records here. You the diaspora think it is hard for you to get hold of your ancestors records, well it is equally as difficult for us who live here to access the appropriate documents....

Margaret,

With the greatest respect, your posting needs to be re-worded. As it stands it is very misleading. Thanks to the Clare Library online genealogical data collections Clare genealogists have better access to online County data than most, if not all, other Irish counties. Only on clicking on your petition link does it become clear that the issue you are addressing is not that "County Clare are well behind all other Counties in Ireland with regard to viewing records online and every where else...." but that the Clare Heritage Centre in Corofin is refusing to allow public access to their taxpayer-financed records. That is quite a different matter.

I don't know whether the petition in question will redress this regrettable sequestering of the records in Corofin. The "signatures" are not validated in any legal sense and include numerous anonymous entries (e.g. Mr Anonymous from Diddillibah, Queensland, Australia; Mrs Anonymous from Sydney, NSW, Australia). Also, very few are Irish taxpayers who paid for the Corofin transcriptions. However, in the context of the current efforts to attract genealogical tourists to Ireland the list might prompt a "power that be" in Clare or Ireland to question the Corofin approach to genealogy so let's hope.

Paddy

[Lucille]

As an Irish tax payer, I am immensely proud of what has been done so far - by the National Archives with the 1901 and 1911 censuses and recently the tithes, and by the government with www.genealogy.ie. What is common to those endeavours is that (1) they are totally free to view and (2) except for some of the church records on genealogy.ie, the original documents are available to view, therefore you are not relying on someone else's transcription.

As Paddy Casey has pointed out, there is a huge amount of material available, totally free, on the Clare Library site. What the Clare Heritage Centre in Corofin holds, that is not easily available, are the church records and their newspaper database. I am open to correction on this, but I don't believe any of those records have been scanned.

While I personally have major issues with the CHC, I would urge caution in what we wish for. Most of the other county heritage centres in Ireland have passed / sold (I don't know which) their records to the Irish Family History Society. The IFHS have made the records available, but with some considerable charges and without any original documents available.

I don't know what formal or informal approaches have been made to the CHC with regard to sharing their resources but I would favour a diplomatic and local scenario. While local officials might well be in favour, especially in light of the Gathering, there is no money available at the moment, so goodwill will be at a premium.

I look forward to a good discussion on this topic and I hope many people take part, with a variety of opinions and hopefully, a variety of suggested solutions.

Lucille

[pwaldron]

Lucille

We need to be careful to distinguish between

• the Irish Family History Foundation which, according to https://rootsireland.ie/index.php?id=69, operates "on a not for profit basis", but which is behind the commercial rootsireland.ie website (formerly brsgenealogy.com) and
• the Irish Family History Society (ifhs.ie).

Somewhere in the dim and distant past, there was a connection between these two bodies, but in recent decades they are totally separate and very different organisations.

We also need to be careful to distinguish between

• the state-run irishgenealogy.ie which you describe and
• the "privately owned and operated" genealogy.ie, with which I am not familiar.

rootsireland.ie is to be commended for dramatically reducing its prices, to the extent that a transcript of a civil record no longer costs substantially more than a photocopy of the original record purchased directly from the GRO. However, rootsireland.ie still operates (and still fails to acknowledge that it operates) a "scratch card sales model": the paying customer has no idea before paying to scratch off the hidden fields in the online transcriptions (a) whether the transcript being purchased contains the field required (e.g. the name of the bride's mother) and (b) whether the original record contains the field required. Question (a) is answered by the purchase; but in the absence of images of original records, question (b) can only be answered by viewing the original record, in local custody, on microfilm in the NLI, or wherever.

If it is the case that Clare Heritage & Genealogical Research Centre objects to the scratch card sales model and is developing an alternative model which makes it clear before purchase exactly which fields are contained in each transcript and in each record, then it is to be commended for not joining rootsireland.ie. However, it should go with the irishgenealogy.ie model, which has been proved viable in a number of counties, including the one just across the Shannon Estuary.

\pw

[Lucille]

Apologies for getting my acronyms and urls confused. Paddy is totally accurate.

Lucille

[Paddy Casey]

Readers of this thread might also like to review the related thread at http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtop ... f=1&t=1639

Paddy Casey

[pwaldron]

I hope you wont be accusing me of plagiarism, Paddy C! I liked your scratch card analogy so much that I have been quoting it right left and centre, and had completely forgotten where it originated!!

[Paddy Casey]

Not at all, Paddy, not at all ! You see, I had forgotten that it came from me. When I read the term "scratch card" I had a vague memory that it had come up somewhere else in connection with "hijacking" of records by commercial database operators and I was interested to see what had been discussed there so I did a search and discovered that it was in a posting I wrote. That's the state of my memory, I'm afraid.

The other analogy that comes to my mind when I see these "Pay for the record and we'll let you see what's in it" was the fairground Lucky Dip that was popular when I was a child. You paid sixpence or something and a machine delved in a barrel full of little black parcels and spat one out for you. If you were lucky the little parcel contained something exciting (for a child) like a tin whistle. If you were unlucky it contained some banal "Chinese" motto on a scrap of paper.

Paddy Casey

P.S. I also notice that I put the wrong link in there. I copy-pasted the Search results without noticing that it simply shows the page corresponding to the Search result rather than the full thread. I have just corrected that so that the link shows the full thread http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtop ... f=1&t=1639 , i.e. commencing with your original thought-provoking posting. P.

[smcarberry]

I was prepared to sit on the sidelines without comment on this general topic of record accessibility through the Clare Heritage Centre. From my own experience with its reports and comparison of those to filmed parish records, I know that its records need correction but, being computerized,those do provide the only way to do a quick survey for a target person across all Clare parishes. Then, while doing a different project this weekend, I became aware of reputable and official information that may shed light on the parameters within which the Centre is supposed to operate, so I show those below. I realize that the Centre may describe its worth as being an enterprise that provides historical information and helps to ensure the underlying records remain available to the public. On the other hand, I am also aware that likely there is only one person who is an employee of the Centre, so it is not an enterprise greatly boosting employment in a rural area, and its version of providing access to historical information is done at an exceedingly high cost, thereby restricting tourism from a level achieved by the online IFHF indexing program in other counties, which we all would like to see adopted by the Clare centre.

Sharon Carberry



List of Grant Aided LEADER Projects 2009/10/11/12
Encouragement of Tourism Activities
"Clare Heritage and Genealogical Centre T/A Clare Heritage Centre Corofin €39,000
Facilities and multimedia upgrade, marketing and promotion"
http://www.cldc.ie/leadergrants.html

LEADER Programme's purpose and contact info:
http://www.cldc.ie/leader.html

Clare Heritage Centre's tax exemption status indicated by its CHY number (#6880) as of 17 Nov 2012:
http://www.revenue.ie/en/about/publicat ... _alpha.xls

http://www.usig.org/countryinfo/ireland.asp
Report summarising Irish tax exemption law
Section VI. A
"A body with charitable tax exemption will have a charity reference number (i.e., a ‘CHY’ number) issued by the Revenue Commissioners. Under sections 207 and 208 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, the income of charitable bodies or trusts established for charitable purposes is exempt from income tax...

The Revenue Commissioners further require that the charity's governing instrument include the following provisions:
...
A clause requiring that all of the organization's income and property be applied solely toward its charitable main objects;
A clause prohibiting directors, trustees or officers from receiving any remuneration or other monetary benefit..."

[pwaldron]

Sharon

You have done a better job of figuring out what's going on in Clare than those of us here on the ground!

So far on this thread, I don't seem to have posted a link to some related facts about the Clare Heritage & Genealogical Centre that I compiled for a recent presentation:
http://www.pwaldron.info/IrishARC/#corofin

I was particularly intrigued to read that charitable status prohibits "directors, trustees or officers from receiving any remuneration or other monetary benefit". Is the reasoning behind this to guarantee that the decision makers in a recognised charity are independent of its employees and suppliers and to remove any possible perception of conflict of interest between the charitable purpose of the company and the personal interests of its directors, trustees and officers? Does this mean, for example, that the company secretary or other director, trustee or officer of a charity cannot also be a paid employee of the charity? Are these universal principles, or are there exemptions?

I had better not speculate further, as I am not an expert on tax law or on company law, and there are confusing quotes from the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 and from the Charities Act 2009 at http://www.usig.org/countryinfo/ireland.asp However, something doesn't add up here.

Having had two accounts closed by the IFHF, as I reported at http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtop ... f=1&t=1639, I will have to disassociate myself from your statement that "the online IFHF indexing program in other counties" is something "we all would like to see adopted by the Clare centre"! I personally prefer the irishgenealogy.ie model!

\pw

[smcarberry]

Paddy,

I agree that the Irish tax code could be clearer overall, and revisions in recent years have been headed in that direction so I have read. I also have read sympathetically the frustration of dealing with IFHF indexing in its current form. Something of open accessibility is better than nothing. Other counties contributing records for indexing permit the Diaspora and their own residents to make progress in family history research without hiring a local expert to do an expensive study. For those descendants without a known parish, Clare offers only the most expensive mode of making inroads into finding the parish. Tourism and the purpose of The Gathering campaign are not served by such exclusivity, which makes continued funding of improvements at CHC seem irrational. Someone needs to wake up and stop rubberstamping those funding requests.

S.C.

[pwaldron]

Listening this morning to the debate about cutting the starting salaries of Irish nurses by 20% gave me another bright idea to help the Irish government to reduce its budget deficit:

Remove public access, online or offline, to all catalogues, indexes and finding aids compiled with government funding by national cultural institutions like the National Archives and National Library, then replace the associated websites with a brochure advertising commissioned research in these resources for a minimum fee of EUR195.

Don't laugh - this is the business model which has apparently successfully served the charitable purposes of the Clare Heritage & Genealogical Centre for many years.

Don't worry - the Government is unlikely to get away with implementing this idea, unless over the dead bodies of people like Catriona Crowe (NAI) and Fiona Ross (NLI), who fully understand the value of free access, both to Irish society and to the Irish diaspora, and who publicly champion this right of free access at every opportunity.

[Clare Admin]

This topic is now locked.
Clare Admin