Monday 23 June 2014

MAJOR NEWS: Enhanced GRO Indexes launch 3 July

It's the news all Irish genealogists have been waiting for! The 'enhanced' civil registration indexes of births, marriages and deaths – the versions that have long been used by GRO staff – are scheduled to launch on IrishGenealogy.ie on Thursday 3 July.

Invitations have been issued to the formal launch event that evening, so this date is unlikely to shift.

All I can tell you for sure right now is that the indexes will be searchable in the same way as the Church Records are currently available on the site, but without images. This is not going to be as super-dooper as the GRONI family history site launched at the end of March, which is a full-blown search-and-view-the-certificate facility, but it is expected to be a huge improvement on the existing online indexes databases.

I don't think any other details are going to be forthcoming prior to the collection's arrival online, so we'll have to wait and see what we get.

As with all records on IrishGenealogy.ie, the site run by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, the GRO Indexes will be free.

More about Irish civil registration records.