Thursday 10 September 2015

IrishGenealogy.ie restores millions of bmd records

The civil registration indexes appear to have been fully restored to IrishGenealogy.ie following the disappearance of millions of marriage and death records earlier this week (see yesterday's blogpost).

From what I can see in a rather rushed check this morning, the site has simply reverted to its former self. Some 6.7million death records can now be searched in the Death Indexes from 1864 to 1963, with only those registered between 1924 to 1963 now sporting the new-style Group Registration ID number.

On the marriage front, all (or most) of those new 'couple format' index entries I mentioned in yesterday's post have been 'decoupled' so that the bride and groom are once again found under their individual names in the index. The number of marriage records showing in the IrishGenealogy Index from 1845 to 1889 now very roughly tally with those recorded in FamilySearch's Index for the same period.

There's been no word from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. I'm not much interested in a blow-by-blow account of how this cock-up occurred or who was responsible for it – I'm sure we can all work out that there was an error/mistake; whether by a human or a computer doesn't really matter. But I think some acknowledgement of the error wouldn't go amiss, along with an brief explanation of what changes are being made to the site... presumably there was some kind of 'upgrade' taking place.

UPDATE 10 September, 3pm: Well, it's an acknowledgement, at least. Heather Humphreys, Minister of the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, tweeted the following this afternoon: