The Clerical Whispers web site has an article of interest to anyone with Kerry ancestry. The site states:
Almost 600,000 Kerry church records have been handed over to the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism as part of a major genealogy project.
They include documents relating to baptism, marriage and death, some of which date back to the 1750s. The records will now appear free of charge on the irish-genealogy.ie website and will allow people to trace their Kerry roots more easily.
You can read the full article at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/11/kerry-church-records-handed-over-to.html.
My thanks to Judith Wight for telling me about this story.
My thanks to Judith Wight for telling me about this story.
Could not access the website for these records. Is anyone else having trouble with this?
Posted by: Linda Spanos | November 16, 2009 at 09:27 AM
The referenced article stares, "The records will now appear free of charge on the irish-genealogy.ie website and ..."
They are not available today but will be in the future.
Scanning records, digitizing them, and then building the online database is a tedious process and takes time. I wouldn't be looking for those records online for a while yet.
- Dick Eastman
Posted by: Dick Eastman | November 16, 2009 at 10:27 AM
http://www.dioceseofkerry.ie/news.view.php?name=Genealogical-Handover&display=dioceasan is the official diocesan news article on the parish records project.
The records which Kerry Genealogical Research Centre transcribed and digitised will be among the first to appear on the website www.irishgenealogy.ie the article states - no hyphen - in answer to comment above that's how you can get to the site; which simply says it will be new in a couple weeks.
My question is what kind of information will be available on the Kerry index. Very many Irish surnames and given names are so similar that if we are still going to only have a minimal index with name/year but not any other information to go on, it will still be quite expensive to sort through. I have wasted quite a bit of money sifting through likely name/year records on a similar Irish records site that has records from the family history centres there, and so far not one of them turned out to be related.
Posted by: Catherine Green | November 16, 2009 at 11:56 AM
Fantastic News, I've been waiting for something to happen with County Kerry for ages. I'm told that 24 November is the date these records go live. The Irish Government will be in charge of the website and at this stage say that it will be free, which is great considering how many Euro we have all lost at the Irish Family History Foundation.
In addition to these records the Government chipped in with 100,000 of their records. These records have already been digitized. Dublin and County Carlow will follow on this website.
The Unknown Ancestor
Posted by: Jeff Davis | November 16, 2009 at 02:34 PM