I've just spent some time trying to work out whether various pre-1858 Irish diocesan records available on the Find My Past (FMP) subscription site are the same records that can be viewed for free on microfilm via the LDS Family History centres.  The answer is I think, by and large, yes, but my point is that FMP are more than a bit coy about actually telling you where they have sourced any of their records from.  Instead for this source, we get twee little stories about the life and times of Jonathan Swift on the records description page.  

As a professional genealogist, I have to be scrupulous about citing sources properly.  If I find records via Ancestry for example, there is very clear information on the original source of the records and they even construct a suggested source citation.  If you don't like the way they do this, then you can easily construct your own citations from the information given. Not so with Find My Past - there is nothing about the original provenance of the records found.   They do boast elsewhere on their site about their "partners" of which FamilySearch (LDS) is one - would it kill them to say which record sets they have sourced from them?

Find My Past were right royally criticised for the appalling relaunch of their dumbed-down search screens a while ago, seemingly impervious to any criticism from their customers.  It would seem to me that they are still letting their customers down by not allowing us to understand the true provenance of the records we are paying to search.

Actually, I think the explanation is simpler - they don't want to give clear information on the source of their records as that would allow us to more easily compare their offering with other (possibly free) sources of the SAME INFORMATION.  To be fair to them, FMP does have a lot of very diverse record sets, some of which are unique, but I'm still not letting them off the hook when it comes to proper source citations.  Granted, lots of people don't seem to bother with them (how many uncorroborated works of fictions have you found on-line passing themselves off as family trees?!), but for those of us who do, FMP is not giving us what we need.  Proper source citations and better identification of underlying data sets are both on their Feedback board as user requests with a healthy number of votes for each, but I'm not encouraged at the "Started" label with no further information or time-scale indicated (another suggestion with the same label has a response from the support team saying that it won't be supported?!) Don't you think they ought to practice what they preach as this expert guide published on FindMyPast.com exhorts us all to do?  If you care about this issue, get on their Feedback board and cast your votes too.

In the meantime, I'll have a go at picking through the various catalogues to see if I can come up with a helpful comparison but without proper source citation information from FMP, it may take a while - I'll have to compare start and end dates.  Check back on the Dioceses and Diocesan Records page in the next few days and hopefully there will be a link to a comparison spreadsheet like those I've done for all the Church of Ireland parishes on the County pages.

Having worked hard to construct this web site in the style of a genealogical kitchen, I was in danger of coming unstuck when faced with all those miscellaneous sources that are a bit more difficult to categorise. But never daunted, I've come up with a set of pages under "Seasonings"!  This is where you can find some of the more eclectic sources that are either very narrowly specialised or are perhaps a bit more random in their content. Nevertheless, if you do strike it lucky within these sources, you may, like me, find some priceless little explosions of flavour that bring a branch of your tree to life or solve a particularly pesky people puzzle!

I'll try not to clutter this section with too much esoteric stuff, just things that have worked for me for the time being. I've started off with some thoughts on following up on Methodists in Ireland, followed up with quite a few suggestions for tracking down Monumental Inscriptions in some more obscure places.  Finally, I've shared my favourite sources found so far for tracing medical men and clergy.

I hope these prove useful and feel free to nominate your favourite spicy sources too!

Genealogy is a pretty ruthless business in that once someone appears as a new leaf in our family tree, we hunt them down until they eventually wither and fall off.  However, sometimes, the leaves just disappear - what happened to them?  Ireland's greatest export has always been her people and if you can't trace an ancestor or relative to the grave in the homeland, then there's a pretty good chance they emigrated.  I've found plenty of examples of younger sons especially seeking fortunes abroad when there was little prospect of them inheriting businesses or land.

America, Australia and New Zealand are all good places to look for Irish emigrants and once one member of the family had established a foothold somewhere new, you can bet siblings, cousins and even parents and grandparents might have decided to follow.  So, I've created "Foreign Fare" to share some of my tips and favourite sources for finding mention of Irish kin abroad.  The first page - "American Pie" - highlights a great free newspaper resource in the shape of the New York Herald Archives but you will have to work it, so check out my tips!  Do give it a try though if you have leaves that might have blown into New York.

OK, dreadful play on words, but I want to promote an update to one of my pages which is now entitled "Probate Districts and Records, 1858+".   Having recently discovered a copy of my 3x great grandfather's will in the District Will Books for the Probate District of Kilkenny on microfilm at the LDS London Family History Centre at Kew, I investigated the catalogue further and found many more film references for similar copy books for other probate districts.  

So, I've updated the page with date ranges and links to the catalogue entries so that you can find the microfilm references that you would need to order to hunt for your own wills.  I've also included details of how to track down possible wills via the various different will calendars that might apply to Irish ancestors.  It might well take quite a bit of effort to track them down, but once you do find a will, it can be a mine of information on relations and can even give you a glimpse of personality behind the legalese - was 4x great uncle Richard a bit of a hypochondriac perhaps?!  

"In the Name of God Amen I, Richard Dreaper, of Castlecomer in the County of Kilkenny, being sick of body but of sound mind do make this my last will and testament ..."

I'm going to add my voice of appreciation to those of other Irish bloggers and applaud the recent release by the National Library of Ireland of their Roman Catholic parish registers in digital form on-line.  The new search page is elegantly simply allowing you to either query by parish name if you know it or swap between diocese and counties on an active map - and you know how much I love maps!  

The results page gives you lots of information, including name variants for the parish and clear details of what is actually available by record type and time period.  I particularly like the image count so you can judge whether you want to browse the whole register or make use of the filter facility that should take you directly to the start of the year you are interested in.  Having said that, I didn't find that this feature was working too well with the registers I chose for some reason but it was no hardship to scroll back through the pages and anyway, paper was expensive in days gone by and priests would use every scrap wisely, so finding records out of step when you are browsing is not uncommon.  This may not have all been the priests fault though - I've been told that pages may have got out of order on the microfilm, so I'm afraid that there may be nothing for it but to do it the old-fashioned way by starting at the beginning and reading through.  That way you will also you get to know the families in the community and start to see sibling births and inter-marriages between families that you will never find through the limited search screens on Roots Ireland (IFHF).

The images might take a moment or too to resolve on screen - be patient - and several are poor quality, but there are brightness controls to play around with to see if things become clearer.  Remember too, that you may encounter many records in Latin, but remember the context of what you are browsing and common abbreviations will start to make sense e.g. "Conj." for "Conjugatus" or "Married" in front of marriage entries. 

The records are far from complete but its easy to compare what the NLI are making available versus what is thought to exist elsewhere outside local custody by checking the NLI results page against the entry for the parish returned from the Irish Ancestors RC parish maps.  Do bear in mind though that the majority if not all of the other sources of RC records that might be quoted on the Irish Ancestors site are likely to be the transcripts done by county family history societies that have been published via Roots Ireland and you will probably need to take out a subscription to search them.

I hadn't used the Roots Ireland website in a while and recently returned to check out something.  I haven't invested in a subscription yet but know all about the deadline of the 29th of September 2015 for the phasing out of credits and free search results.  But given that deadline is still some months away and my account summary looks like this, I thought I would still be able to see some results.  Nope.
Every time I clicked on the 228 it took me straight to the "Buy a Subscription" page?  Contacting their customer support went something like this ...

Me: "Why can't I use my remaining free searches"?
IFHF: "We are replacing our old pay-per-view system with a subscription service. As part of that process, any pay-per-view accounts are being closed down. You have 0 paid credits remaining and therefore you can no longer view the result pages. You can still search but you cannot view the result pages, you just get counts of records."
Me: "Then why are you confusing me by still displaying 228 free searches as still being available to me?"
IFHF: "I agree with you.  The pay-per-view service has run on now for 9 months and that is plenty of time."

Well that told me then!  Turns out that I had last bought some credits just over a year ago and this is what decides whether or not any remaining free search pages will work for you, not the 29th September deadline.  Nice of the customer support team to explain that to me in such helpful tones .... NOT!  I appreciate that the IFHF have invested in getting these transcripts and indexes on-line and need an income to keep the service viable, but if you are going to play with the grown-ups in the subscription world, pay some attention to what your interface actually looks like to the paying public once in a while and do us all a favour and send your customer support team back to charm school.  

A year ago, the Representative Church Body Library in Ireland shared a mighty PDF tome on-line with the genealogical community that attempted to explain which Church of Ireland Parish Registers have survived and where to find them.  Indeed, I wrote about this wondrous bounty in my blog on my sister site (see Church of Ireland Parish Registers - the definitive list")   This document has now been updated after collaboration between the RCBL and PRONI, such that there is a new colour coding within it to indicate what can be consulted north of the border.  To go to the latest version of the document, follow this link - "Table of CoI Parochial Registers throughout Ireland". 

I will be studying it closely over the next few days and planning updates to the county spreadsheets so bear with me while I bring things up to date.  That's the trouble with publishing data - there's always more of it coming along later but if it helps us all find what we are looking for then I say, bring it on!