Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Ancestry updates Irish headstones, burials & obituaries collections

Ancestry has updated three of its collections that offer 'death' records for Ireland and Northern Ireland. They are:

The UK and Ireland Find a Grave™ Index, (1300s-Current) has been seeing regular additions. Having added 1,987,420 new records in the last three months, it now holds a total of 16,638,739 entries.

Unfortunately, only a teeny 3% of these additions relates to Ireland ie the deceased may have been born on the island, died there or both, but let's not grumble. An update bringing more than 62,500 Irish records is not to be sniffed at. All 32 historical counties are represented.

Global, Find a Grave™ Index for Burials at Sea and other Select Burial Locations (1300s-Current) This collection has been updated with more than 585,500 entries over the last four months. It now holds a total of 13,874,232 records, globally. Of these, 25,361 are indexed with details of a birth, death or burial in Ireland.

I've still not quite worked out the criterion for entry to this collection. In many cases, the place of death is known but the place of burial is uncertain. In other examples, the place of birth and burial may be known, but the death itself took place somewhere else. I seem to have noticed a several entries relating to cremations in this most recent update, none of them appearing to have a permanent marker.

UK and Ireland, Newspapers.com™ Obituary Index, 1800s-current With more than 3million new entries added last week, it's sad to see that not one of them related to the island of Ireland. There remain, then, some 40,971 indexed entries for obituaries published in Antrim (21,363) and Dublin (19,608), while the collection as a whole has grown to 22,595,438 records.

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