Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 14 October 2010
13 Deputy Paul Connaughton asked the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport the progress that has been made with regard to the digitisation of genealogy archives; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [36729/10]
View answerThe National Archives has now completed the digitisation of the 1911 and 1901 Census. The mammoth project involved digitising the census returns for those years and background material and making it searchable on-line by all of the available data fields, such as name, address, occupation, religion, relationship to head of household, etc. The project has been developed in several phases — the 1911 returns for the 32 counties were digitised first — followed by the 1901 returns. All of these records are now available online and 173,704 unique visitors logged on to the site in September 2010. This brought the total number of unique visitors to this site, to the end of September, to over 9 million.
The 1911 Census records have also being placed on the Europeana website which links to over 6 million digital items in
Images,
Sound,
Text,
Video,
from Europe's archives, audio-visual collections galleries, libraries and museums.
My Department hosts the website www.irishgenealogy.ie which contains a searchable database of Church records of Baptism, Marriage and Burial from Dublin City and Counties Carlow, Cork and Kerry. The website is an important aid to family history and genealogical research and will be an attraction for the Irish Diaspora to visit Ireland in search of their roots. Since its launch in Nov. 2009 a total of 239,068 Unique Visitors have visited the Church records site with a total of 34,707,315 hits recorded.
On Wednesday 16th June 2010 I had the pleasure of launching further Church records on this site along with His Grace, Dr. John R.W. Neill, Archbishop of Dublin in St. Werburgh's Church, Dublin. These additional records were made up of Church of Ireland records for Dublin City, Counties Carlow and Kerry and Roman Catholic Records for the County and City of Cork. The website www.irishgenealogy.ie now contains over 2 million records. Work is currently ongoing to add up to a further 1 million Church Baptism, Marriage and Burial records from Dublin City and County Cork and this work should be substantially completed by end 2010 and will then be added to this website early in 2011. This project is being undertaken with the support of our National repositories, the National Archives and the National Library of Ireland.
The majority of the records also have the corresponding image of the original entry in the Baptism, Marriage or Burial register available to view. Images for all the records will be made available during 2011. This level of detail, along with the success of the 1901/1911 Census online, will be a significant boost to the Roots' Tourism industry in Ireland. The Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport is working closely with Tourism Ireland to ensure that Ireland reaps the dividends of this work.
