Thursday 22 December 2011

It's Christmas — and it's all good news!

Just in time to play Santy, FindMyPast.ie has announced a discount of 10% on all subscription purchased at any point from today until the end of the festive celebrations.

The intention is to allow more researchers access to the nearly 10 million records held on the site and to launch Start Your Family Tree Week with a seasonal hurrah, even though it doesn't officially begin until the 26th.

Each day from St. Stephen's day to New Year's Day, FMP.ie will be giving out hints and tips to help new researchers make early progress with their Irish genealogy. They will be delivering charts, interview guides and plenty of advice to help you along the way. There will also be festive challenges and spot prizes via facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

The discount will be valid until 2nd January.

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Glasnevin Museum, which won the international THEA award for Themed Entertainment in March (the first cemetery to do so), has been nominated for the 2012 European Museum Award.

The Museum is run by Glasnevin Trust, which last month won CIGO's 2012 Award for Excellence in Genealogy (you can read the story here).

Here's wishing them good luck for a hat-trick.

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The long awaited free church records from Co Monaghan, which were due to appear on www.irishgenealogy.ie in October, are still in the pipe, according to the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht.

After a couple of dashed hopes for upload earlier in the year, the Monaghan collection did not appear with the last batch of new records (for Dublin and Cork) two months ago. Ominously, there was no mention of them either.

When RootsIreland subsequently added Monaghan records to its pay-to-view site, many researchers were concerned that the project to deliver them free had been shelved. The deafening silence from IrishGenealogy.ie on the matter reinforced this opinion.

So, the news that the records will be online and free in 'early 2012' is very welcome. Even if the 'early' bit should probably be taken with a pinch of salt!

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As it's Christmas, I hope you'll forgive me a little indulgence. I wanted to announce that the first of a series of guest articles by yours truly is now live on the Certificate of Irish Heritage website.

This first one deals with locating the townland of your ancestors, something that often proves the greatest obstacle to the descendants of Irish emigrants. There are more articles waiting in the wings about the Irish census, Griffiths Valuation etc, and they'll be appearing in the New Year.

Okay, that's my personal promotion over with for the year, and this is probably the last you'll hear from me till after Christmas. Have a great time, all of you. I'll be back with a review of the year next week.