IFHF Clare RC records now online

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smcarberry
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IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by smcarberry » Sat Mar 08, 2014 12:11 pm

I have just received an email from the Irish Family History Foundation stating that some Co. Clare RC parish records are online, with more expected in the future (West Clare parishes are completely missing in this initial group). The link is http://www.rootsireland.ie

This is the email section with the announcement.

Sharon Carberry
IFHF Clare RC records online.jpg
IFHF Clare RC records online.jpg (30.97 KiB) Viewed 17456 times

Kurt in S.A.
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by Kurt in S.A. » Sat Mar 08, 2014 3:54 pm

Very few of these parishes are shown in the Griffith's evaluation:

http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... /index.htm

How is this information from Roots Ireland going to be useful?

Kurt

smcarberry
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by smcarberry » Sat Mar 08, 2014 4:38 pm

Kurt,

I suggest using this page (scroll down to RC parishes), which will match up to the RC records on the IFHF site. There are also civil parishes used for governmental purpose, not always with the same names.

http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... rishes.htm

IFHF states that these newly online records are coming from the Clare gen. center in Corofin, which has church records transcribed several years ago by young workers not trained in genealogy. While that database contains errors in spelling and surnames are completely wrong in some instances, the database as a whole can be searched to narrow down likely areas of residence for family researchers who have no idea where in Clare a specific family had lived. It is likely that all of the records stop in 1880, which is as far the LDS filming staff went when doing filming many years ago; it is my understanding that those films were used for the transcriptions. As you may be aware, reading from films of very old, tattered pages is not half as good as using the original pages.

These newly available records have been awaited for years by some family historians. I already used the LDS films for my research.

Sharon C.

Kurt in S.A.
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by Kurt in S.A. » Sat Mar 08, 2014 8:24 pm

Admittedly, I'm not up on all the variations in parishes, etc. I registered on the IFHF site and searched for a relative's name who was born in 1823 (Clondagad Parish) and there was one record found for a baptism within 5 years of that. But without much more information to go on to corroborate it, I really don't know if this record belongs to my relative.

Kurt

pwaldron
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by pwaldron » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:31 pm

Sharon,

I believe that the indexes and extracts now held by the company located in Corofin and by almost every parish in Clare were based on the original registers still held in the parishes. In some parishes, they cover pre-1880 registers which the LDS missed and in many parishes they cover registers from 1880 to 1895 or later which the LDS deliberately did not film.

\pw

smcarberry
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by smcarberry » Tue Mar 11, 2014 6:13 pm

Paddy,

I appreciate your taking time to make a clarification to help others decide on the usefulness of these newly available records. I think we are in agreement that all the RC records for Clare will be based on records written in each parish at roughly the time of each sacramental event. For many years there have been two main ways that those have been available to the public: (1) the LDS films and (2) the Corofin Centre's transcriptions made by the young workers. (For some parishes like Ennis, there are also now transcriptions made directly from original records, and then it's a matter of how many of those now appear online).

So, basically, the decision has been whether to rent a LDS film or order a report from the Corofin Centre. With the IFHF having what the Corofin Centre has had, from this time forward a family researcher has another choice. If the IFHF resource is used, it will be up to the researcher to decide how useful the transcriptions are, whereas a report directly from the Corofin Centre is made by its highly-knowledgeable staff who also use other kinds of data in drawing conclusions. Nonetheless, for getting to a rough idea of where a specific family may have lived, it is possible to use the IFHF resource alone.

I am not commenting on the usefulness of the Corofin Centre's transcriptions from 1880 to 1900, now also lodged with IFHF. My people were all gone from Clare as of 1864, so I have not needed to use and evaluate anything for that later period of time. Having used my parish's film for 1835 to 1880 and comparing entries which I viewed on the film to those cited in a Corofin Centre report ordered by a cousin, I can say that there were needless errors made in the transcriptions held by the Corofin Centre - surnames were wrong and an obvious marriage entry on the film was completely missed (and to this day likely does not exist in the Corofin Centre's database and thus not in the IFHF database). That category of error is compounded by the uncertainty in some entries caused by cramped writing, missing pieces of an original page, faded ink, etc.

I might also comment that, now having viewed films of other parishes alluded to in my cousin's Corofin Centre report as also having Carberry entries, there were no more to be found at all. That indicates the possibility that the IFHF database might lead to an incorrect conclusion as to the parishes having a particular surname. However, if the researcher remembers to use the IFHF database as a rough guide, and then goes on to view specific parish films for corroboration, it should still be possible to view the IFHF
database as a resource.

This is so much more than most people want to read. Sorry, but these fine points are ones that occur to us who have been pouring over Clare resources for a long time. We are not just being negative. I am ecstatic about what the online era has done for family research.

S.C.

Rosie
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by Rosie » Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:44 pm

For those not used to Irish research, something that applies to all parishes everywhere in the country :
most people did not keep their own records with the result that they did not know how old they were. If asked, they guessed, usually wrongly, usually underestimating their ages, which meant that they were older than they thought. Dates and ages taken from death and burial records are notoriously unreliable, being at best, secondhand information or, at worst, just a wild guess. Few families over here could afford the luxury of a gravestone and, where they exist, may have been put up 20, 30, even 50 years after the event, leaving the accuracy of the inscription highly suspect.

This is not to discourage anyone but just to raises awareness of the fact, and to allow up to 20 years (and sometimes even more) for discrepancies ~ 2 to 5 years hardly counts, it is so slight; 10 years is more common than you would think, and sometimes the difference can be as much as 20 years or even more, unlikely though this may seem. There is less room for mistakes with children's ages. Be flexible and you will find more.
Rosie

Paddy Casey
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by Paddy Casey » Sun Apr 27, 2014 10:09 am

Another tip here: individuals were sometimes tempted to "nudge" their dates of birth, e.g. to bring forward the maturation of an insurance policy, to bring forward a pension eligibility date, to avoid eligibility for military service (or, as happened in WW1, some adventurous male children misstated their ages in order to go and fight), or to become eligible for marriage. In a given case it is usually difficult to prove that such temptation was the reason for an age discrepancy but in my researches I have come across cases where the children told me that their parents had "nudged" their birthdates to some advantage. Again: no proof, just hearsay.

Paddy

lenc
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Re: IFHF Clare RC records now online

Post by lenc » Sun Apr 27, 2014 11:21 am

In our family, my Grandfather managed to be a year younger in 1901 than he was in 1911!

I think it was Tir na nOg they lived in and not 29 Abbey Street Ennis at all!


:lol: :lol: :lol:

.

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