RootsChat.Com

I'm reposting this here (it was originally as reply to 'National Burial Index' post) in the hope of someone else noticing it.

My question is, could someone explain if there is an index to the LDS Ireland death index?


Death records of Ireland, 1864-1870, with index of deaths, 1864-1921
153 microfilm reels ; 35 mm.

Is is ordered by year, county or what? I certainly couldn't afford to order all
153 films (where I live in Denmark, all Irish or British films would have to be ordered from abroad in advance, as the local family history centres only have Scandinavian records)

There's been a great debate in the Danish media the last few weeks over a new law on naming that's going through the Danish parliament. Apparently some genealogists are up in arms about it.

Denmark has a very restrictive law at present which may seem weird to people in English-speaking countries. There is a list of approved first names (a few thousand). If the name you're thinking of calling your child (or yourself by deed poll) isn't on the list, you can apply for permission. Foreign citizens living in Denmark often get permission, but for Danes you'd really have to demonstrate some ancestral link to that naming tradition.

For changing your surname, or choosing a middle name, you can only pick ones which are in your recent ancestry - i.e. the surnames strictly follow the blood. So if you're a foreigner whose name makes it difficult for you to even get a job interview, you can't just change your surname to Jensen.

The Danish Liberal/Conservative government has proposed liberalising this, saying that in a free society you are surely in a better position to decide what you want to call yourself than some official in a government ministry. There will however be some restrictions, avoiding some of the naming horrors that British parents sometimes subject their offspring to!

Also, there are the reserved surnames to take into account. It is possible in Denmark to purchase exclusive rights to a surname, if you can prove that all current holders are related to you. This then prevents others from adopting that surname, even if it's in their recent ancestry. The new law proposes that if there are more than 1000 holders of a reserved surname, that name should lose its protected status. Considering the Danish population is 5 million, that seems pretty reasonable to me. In any case, for most Danes, surnames are only 100 - 150 years old, converting a particular generations'  patronyms to surnames. I.e. those called Jensen are not related to each other - all they have in common is that they all have a paternal ancestor whose first name was Jens. Only the nobles had real surnames before that.

However, a petition with 20,000 signatures protesting against the law has been delivered. Many of the protesters are aristocrats. They fear that the other provisions in the law - that you can always convert a middle name to a surname, and that divorced or widowed women can keep their ex-husband's name and give it to a new husband - will allow determined conspiracies to start collecting a particularly desirable surname, adding to its numbers until it's over the 1000-name limit and thus free-for-all. Sounds pretty unlikely and paranoid to me.

Genealogists have also entered the debate, some claiming that this will make a mockery of family history, will confuse future researchers, etc. That seems bizarre to me - that the living should have their freedom restricted to make things a bit easier for future family history hobbyists.

Anyway, the government has now backed down a bit, now proposing a surname will only be freely available if more than 2000 individuals have it. That will leave about 130 surnames to freely choose from: Jensen, Larsen, Petersen and the like.

So what do you think? Are surnames the property of their owners, in which case the Danish government would be proposing the theft of private property? Or is it a basic human right to call yourself and your children what you like?

As many have discovered, the indexing at http://scotlandspeople.gov.uk leaves much to be desired, and you often spend credits in vain only to discover it's the wrong individual. That's part of their business model, I suppose, but we might as well try to spend our money as wisely as possible. Here are some examples of how to get value for money and even get some free results. It takes a little patience, and probably annoys the hell out of Scotlandspeople, since it hits their servers with many non income-generating queries. What a shame!

It's often worthwhile designing a search so that it results a number of results, for example where the surname is rare, or where you're interested in a surname in a particular district. There can be up to 25 results on a single page, at a cost of 1 credit, so try to go for the 25. E.g. search for Deaths, "TOWERS"; County: Renfrew; Year From: 1912; Year To: 1954, 25 results. Or if it's 2 pages, try to go for 50 results - try selecting districts - up to 5 at a time - to narrow the search. Even if you're currently only looking for one particular individual, there's a good chance that some of the others could be relevant later. Even once you've narrowed the search down so it returns 25 results, try to expand it a little. E.g. if 1866-1913 returns 25 results, try 1865-1913, 1866-1914 etc until you go over the 25 and have to go back one year. I.e. try to get the most extensive search for your 1 credit - you may well want to go back to this search later while looking for another individual.

I often have a browser window open searching the IGI, or FreeCEN at the same time as Scotlandspeople. In Scotlandspeople, you can't for example, search for all children of given parents - you have to know their names to search for them. So find them first if possible other places and then search Scotlandspeople.

There's a maximum limit of 5500 characters in a Rootschat post, so for my examples, see the following post:

I see there Scotlandspeople site is now mentioning new indexes and data to be available next week. It doesn't say which, but it must be some of the 1841-71 censuses which have been promised for so long (that is they promised the images and gave no information about indexing)

I have no experience yet of family history research in Ireland, but I understand there are Irish BMD indexes on microfilm at Family History Centres. None of the Family History Centres in  Denmark, where I live, have any British or Irish data.

I'd be very grateful if someone could look up the entry for the birth of my Great-grandfather, William John Douglas.

If the ages state on census and his death certificate are correct, he would have been born between the 6th and the 15th Apr 1871.

One of my relatives believes he was born in County Down. He certainly came from Northern Ireland, and was Protestant. His father was Archibald Douglas, labourer, and mother Margaret Jane Wray.