Friday, 11 September 2015

FindMyPast adds National Archives of Ireland's collection of National School registers

Now at FindMyPast: National School Registers collection
FindMyPast has added a collection of National School Registers to its Education & Work category.

It contains more than 142,000 entries dating from 1860 to 1920 and includes registers from an unknown number of schools (none of them still operating) from 24 counties in the Republic of Ireland. The excluded counties are Carlow and Westmeath.

The personal information held about each pupil in these registers typically includes name, date of birth, address,
occupation of father and religion.

Some also contain details about class attendance, previous schools, date of leaving and even examination results.

The collection is particularly strong in registers from Counties Cavan, Donegal and Dublin, which make up just under half the number of indexed entries.

There is also a 4,891 set from County Clare in the FindMyPast collection; I am advised by Peter Beirne of the County Clare Library Local Studies team that these records are unlikely to duplicate any of the School Roll/Register Book transcriptions freely available at the Library's genealogy website.

Provenance

FindMyPast's new collection of records comes from the National Archives of Ireland (NAI). This fact is not mentioned in the FindMyPast 'Learn More' notes, and while there's an NAI copyright notice in the left-hand corner of the screen when you're looking at a register image, this notice does not transmit when you copy/print the image for your files.

Sorry to bang on about this, but I can't understand why the origin of a collection, complete with catalogue references, is so regularly omitted in the information provided by the database. After all, provenance is everything for the integrity of genealogical research. I mentioned this when another collection recently joined the database, and it seems to be settling in as regular practice. (Interestingly, this was long a criticism thrown at Ancestry, but they seem to be making more effort of late to include researcher-friendly details.)