Regardless of recent changes the problem was that people were buying records in the hope that they were for the person being researched..it is the lottery aspect that is the problem!!
That, plus the fact that they have restricted the search criteria to that offered just a week ago - you can no longer target a search for a couple's children to a known parish and religious denomination, only by county now. They have therefore reduced the ability to effectively search on the site, which will force more false positives, which were (more) easily avoided before. That may generate more money for them, but I suspect a lot of people will be throwing their porridge at their computers the more it happens!
You can also just search the registers yourself which will cost you;
Fees for searches in Registers of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials
The following scale of fees was approved by the General Synod in 2002:-
Searches up to one hour €20 / Stg£12
For each additional hour or part of an hour €20 / Stg£12
Each additional certified copy €10 / Stg£6 from http://ireland.anglican.org/information/64 so these are your ancestor's records, are they also holding people to ransom???
Absolutely!!!! It is working out cheaper for me to go to PRONI by ferry on a day trip and look up the records myself on microfilm (albeit not all are there). I live in Ayrshire, so ferry just down road, and once taken it now virtually arrives at the doorstep in the docks at Belfast - so I am absolutely looking into a visit. PRONI's microfilmed church holdings are listed at
http://www.proni.gov.uk/guide_to_church_records.pdf whilst NLI's RC listings on microfilm are listed at
http://www.nli.ie/en/parish-register.aspxIf you employ someone to go for you then they have to be paid too...on top of fees!
Indeed - hence why I will go myself!
Their fees aren't bad IF you knew you were getting the correct ones!!
And there's the issue. When records for Antrim first went online, as supplied by the Ulster Historical Foundation, I noticed that the date given for birth/baptism on the civil records returned on the site were actually baptism dates. I knew this because the UHF's own site had also made the records available and they returned both birth and baptism dates in an entry (obviously compiled from 2 sources). Having matched up a couple of records on the RootsIreland site to that I had previously obtained from the UHF, I knew there was an issue, and so alerted RootsIreland, who informed me that they had mistaken uploaded the baptism dates to their site instead of the actual birth dates - it was quickly changed. So I would rather see an original record than a transcript, as you can never know what you are seeing.
GRONI has apparently now digitised all its BMD recs, with a view to doing a 'ScotlandsPeople' in the near future, and the GRO in the south certainly makes them available at 6 Euros each as photocopied extracts, including pre-1922 for the north. 5 Euros for a transcript or 6 Euros for a photocopy is a no brainer - the copy any day! NB: For those in Scotland, civil birth indexes for Northern Ireland from 1922-1995 are available in the ScotlandsPeople Centre (but not marriages or deaths).
With church records the National Library of Ireland is planning at some stage to digitise all of its Roman Catholic records and place them online for free - this appears to have taken a step back recently, but I believe is still an aspiration. So as in the past, when Roots Ireland charged 10 Euros a time, the simple option at this end is to bide my time again, because I suspect other options will present themselves.
Again, to reiterate - my bigger concern here is the regressive step applied to the search criteria, and the misconception that the site is now cheaper - only if bulk buying, and as I've illustrated, for casual users the costs may significantly increase. So potentially more expensive in certain cases and much harder to use for certain basic tasks - doesn't that warrant a protest?
Chris