National Library of Ireland announces its most significant ever digitization project for Irish genealogy

If you stayed off the internet yesterday and didn’t talk to any of your genealogy buddies, you probably missed hearing about what is perhaps the most siginificant digitization project ever in Irish genealogy. This news calls for fireworks — provided they are lit far from any precious records.

If you have Irish Catholic ancestry, I suggest you cancel all plans for next summer and stay close to your computer.

The National Library of Ireland (NLI) announced yesterday that it will digitize about 390,000 images of Catholic parish register microfilms and publish them online, for free, on a dedicated website by the summer of 2015.

Colette O’Flaherty, head of Special Collections at the NLI, said, “This is the most ambitious digitisation project in the history of the NLI, and our most significant ever genealogy project.”

These records are considered the single most important source of information on Irish family history prior to the 1901 Census. Dating from the 1740s to the 1880s, they cover 1,091 parishes throughout Ireland, and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records.”

According to the news release from the NLI, the digital images “will not be transcribed or indexed by the NLI, and the images will be of the microfilms of the original registers, which – in some cases – were in poor condition when the microfilming took place.”

The microfilms have been available to visitors to the NLI since the 1970s. Next summer, they will be available to everyone around the world.

The NLI news release is available here.