It could be over a year before access to the National Archives of Ireland’s genealogy records microsites is restored, a senior staff member has said.
In July, the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) posted on its website that its microsites had been taken offline.
The microsites offered access to many of Ireland’s family history records, including the 1901 and 1911 censuses.
These are the only existing complete censuses for Ireland before 1926 due to government destruction of records and the fire of 1922, when the Public Record Office of Ireland was damaged in an explosion during the Irish Civil War.
The other collections included 19th-century census fragments, tithe applotment books, valuation office books, different collections of wills, crew lists, diocesan marriage licences and convert rolls. Because of the lack of Ireland’s early census records, these additional record sets are particularly important in Irish genealogy.
However, the 19th century and 1901 and 1911 censuses are available elsewhere on NAI's website. The other collections are also on external websites, including free family history website FamilySearch. Accredited Genealogists Ireland has prepared a full guide to where to find the records on its website.
Speaking to Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, Zoë Reid, NAI’s Keeper of Public Services and Collections, said: “The material is still available both in the National Archives and on other sources. We apologise for the inconvenience. It wasn’t done on a whim and it wasn’t done to annoy people. There was a reason we had to take them down.”
Zoë went on to explain how the NAI was now working on “rebuilding” the sites and they would be “hopefully coming back better and bigger”, with additional material previously published on commercial websites, as well as tackling problems such as flaws in the indexing of the tithe applotment book records. She also said the sites had problems due to their age which had not been addressed while the NAI was focused on the launch of the 1926 Irish census earlier this year.
Asked when the sites would come back, she replied: “I’m loathe to give a specific timescale. I’d like to say that there would be something within 12 months, within a year, and that would be my aim. In theory, the material is there, but we have to rebuild databases from scratch.”
