Wednesday 14 November 2012

GRONI earns CIGO's 2012 Award for Excellence

At this evening's AGM (see details below), the Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations will announce that the 2012 recipient of CIGO's annual Award for Excellence in Genealogy is the General Register Office of Northern Ireland (GRONI).

In making the Award, CIGO recognised that GRONI completed its digitisation of all Births, Marriage and Death records for the six Counties of Northern Ireland last year. This allowed for new and more informative indexes to be created which can be searched on computer within the Public Search Room (PSR) in Belfast. A new PSR was then set up with 22 positions for researchers. This new computerised system is extremely user-friendly and allows for many varieties of searches of the indexes including 'wildcard' searches.

Currently, GRONI is working towards creating a new online access service to its records to start 2014, the tendering for which is under consideration.

CIGO hopes to make the presentation of the Award to GRONI later this year.

Tonight's CIGO AGM will be held in the Seminar Room of the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin at 6:30pm. It will be followed by a free lecture – Harnessing the power of reverse genealogy – with Mike Feerick, the chairman and founder of Ireland Reaching Out. This should start at 7:30pm and all are welcome to attend.