This page has been revised and completely rewritten here.

familysearch.org workshop

Dublin City Library and Archive

Family History Day:
The Insider’s Guide to Family History Research

A Guided Tour of Family History Sources on the Internet

2:00pm

27 Mar 2010

by Paddy Waldron

WWW version: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~pwaldron/gilbert/ or http://tinyurl.com/pwaldron

Outline:

The home page

• FamilySearch.org will take you to http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp
• The most useful links are
  • Download PAF (middle right)
  • Record Search pilot (Search Records dropdown, top left)
  • Is `pilot' used in the sense of `pilot project' or `river pilot'?
  • International Genealogical Index only search (well hidden)

Personal Ancestral File (PAF)

• Start putting your findings in a database ASAP
• PAF is free and as good as most
• Features I would like:
  • online database with offline backup
  • fast read and write access
  • collaborative (like Wikipedia)
  • photographs with nametags (like Facebook with fotobounce)
  • private and public views (like tribalpages)
  • GEDCOM import and export
  • werelate.org is promising

The Irish Civil Registration System

• Non-Catholic marriages from April 1, 1845
• All events from January 1, 1864
• Geographical hierarchy:
  • Poor Law Unions (PLUs), now known as superintendent registrar's districts, divided into
  • Registration districts, sometimes known as dispensary districts
• Many PLUs straddle the boundaries of two, or even three, counties (e.g. Roscrea)
• The Townland Index will tell you what PLU a townland is in.

International Genealogical Index (IGI)

• contains most Irish births registered from 1864-c.1880 with exact dates and parents' names
• some records contain birthplace from certificate (townland)
• some records contain page number and registration district
• some records contain county only
• some records contain no place information
• some records are stored in more than one version
• My greatgrandmother is at http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/igi/individual_record.asp?recid=500049123994
• Variables after recid are redundant when bookmarking individual records
• Search strategy:
  • Must set Region to British Isles
  • Select Country/County if more than 200 hits
  • Use Ctrl-F to browse through search results
  • To find a whole family, fill in father's first and last names and mother's first name only
  • Lots of combinations of search fields are not permitted
• IGI also has good selection of Irish parish registers (e.g. pre-1845 Limerick City Church of Ireland parishes)
• IGI has a lot of rubbish, e.g. Anthony Parker at www.familysearch.org/eng/search/igi/individual_record.asp?recid=100035333518
• Alumni Dublinenses:

  PARKER, ANTHONY, Pen. (Mr Cashin, Limerick), [admitted to TCD] Apr. 15, 1722, aged 18; s. of John, Armiger [Esquire]; b. Co. Limerick.

• Beware the message:

  Record submitted after 1991 by a member of the LDS Church. No additional information is available. Ancestral File may list the same family and the submitter.

Irish Civil Registration Indexes

• Flash Player required, so you probably can't use it on your handheld device as you wander around in a cemetery!
• The URL for Irish Civil Registration Indexes, 1845-1958 has changed slightly as of late April 2010 from http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#c=1408347;p=collectionDetails;t=searchable to http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#c=fs%3A1408347&p=collectionDetails. The word `marriage' in the search results has (hopefully temporarily) reverted to `residence', which appeared briefly when the database first went online. I have created a slightly modified tinyurl for the new address; anyone who has bookmarked the old tinyurl should add a 2 to the end of the bookmarked URL: http://tinyurl.com/cqjrlw2.
• Contains all index entries to end of 1958
• Indexes were microfilmed by LDS missionaries around that time
• replaces roughly 1,033 separate indexes with a single index (19 annual indexes to non-Catholic marriages for 1845-1863; 14 annual indexes each to births, marriages and deaths from 1864-1877; and 324 quarterly indexes each to births marriages and deaths from 1878 to 1958)
• Fields in the index:
  • Name
  • Age at death
  • PLU
  • Volume
  • Page
  • Year
  • Quarter (explicit from 1878; infer from volume pre-1878:
    • QI: Vols 1-5
    • QII: Vols 6-10
    • QIII: Vols 11-15
    • QIV: Vols 16-20)
  • Mother's maiden surname (from 1928 on)
• PLU is misleading called `Registration District'!
• Search form does not allow searching by most of these!
• Other fields in the search form are redundant
• You can type a county name in the Location field, but it vanishes unless you wait for a dropdown list to appear and then select it
• You can restrict Event to, say, Marriage, but this is ignored unless you also specify a year
• 5,600 hits means more than 5,600 hits, so narrow your search and try again
• Otherwise, use the "Filter" links at the top of the screen to refine the search results
• The biggest challenge is to find a bride whose surname is unknown
• The equivalent search for England and Wales at http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl shows how this should be done

Further reading

• I have not dealt with FamilySearch beta
• `Familysearch.org Database Reviewed' by Steven Smyrl, Irish Roots, 2009, Number 2, pp.18-19.
• Irish Civil Registration - Where Do I Start? by Eileen Ó Dúill and Steven C. ffeary-Smyrl, Exploring Irish Genealogy No.2, 2000, published by Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations
• FamilySearch Labs Blog
• My own musings on the Clare Past forum