Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Headway made with Irish Census corrections

As anyone who has submitted corrections to the 1901/1911 Irish Census team at the National Archives of Ireland will know, no amendments have been made to the online database. The 'black hole', as the correction facility became known, was much talked about and much moaned about on online genealogy forums. When the Irish economy also took up residence in the black hole, it seemed futile to even bother mentioning the census corrections.

Some five years after the first corrections were submitted, there is some good news. Well, fingers-crossed type of good news, anyway.

While the under-resourced National Archives has not been able to fund a member of staff to deal with the amendments, it has recently been making headway with the backlog, thanks to an intern working on the JobBridge* scheme.

If all continues to go well, the Irish Census website will be rebuilt in the New Year, accommodating all those carefully submitted corrections.

(At the end of yesterday's post about the newly-released Tithe Applotment Books, I made reference to the fact that the NAI will be not be in a position to respond to corrections submitted by researchers. Just to be clear about this: the Census will be corrected first. The TABs will have to join the queue.)

*JobBridge is a National Internship Scheme that provides work experience placements for interns for a 6 or 9 month period.