Public Records Office recreation project. Launch 2022.

[Sinann]

Plan to recreate the building and archive virtually.
Sounds great, fingers crossed it will be.
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2018/0207/939122-records-office/

http://beyond2022.ie/

[kooky]

Very interesting!
Kooky

[luimneach]

Heard this on news today,Just wondering what a virtual archive is?I assume it just refers to a physical representation of shelves etc where records were stored in 1922.The actual records were virtually all destroyed

[Sinann]

The video says you will be brought to surviving records or substitutes. They can't recover the lost records so it will only be what we already know about and hopefully a few things we don't know about yet but it sounds like everything they can collect will be in one searchable place.

[Sinann]

Claire Santry as usual explains it all very well.
http://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2018/02/beyond-2022-project-aims-to-recreate.html

[Wexflyer]

The video says you will be brought to surviving records or substitutes. They can't recover the lost records so it will only be what we already know about and hopefully a few things we don't know about yet but it sounds like everything they can collect will be in one searchable place.

Precisely. So, while this is undoubtably useful, most records of the old PRO are still irretrievably lost.

Personally, though, I think the money would be much, much better spent preserving/recording surviving records which are often in parlous state. For example, parish records. Many were not filmed by the NLI decades ago. No effort was ever made to fill in the gaps. I can personally state that many of these parish registers are in awful state - professional conservation is really needed, but no one is doing anything along those lines, church or state. Registers are even being lost - they need proper curation.

[sirsimon]

I agree with wexflyer, though this all sounds really interesting and promising, further attention needs to be paid towards the parish registers, which are in dire need of restoration.

It would also be nice for more efforts to be made in releasing the 1926 census early and maybe even releasing more recent births, marriages and deaths. I am finding it difficult to trace more recent events than ones before the civil war.

[Purpeller]

That's all well and good but the parish records do not belong to the State, they are the property of the Catholic Church.

If we're creating a wishlist, why not the Registry of Deeds, which does belong to the State.

There is a campaign to release the 1926 early - https://www.change.org/p/leo-varadkar-release-the-1926-irish-census

[hallmark]

We give far too much stuff away for free!!

So where is the money to come from for Preservation/Conservation and putting more stuff online to give away for free??