Plugging IntoThe Auld Sod
May 22 2000
Ray and Christi Davis recently visited cemeteries in rural southwestern Ireland on a rather unusual mission: They recorded names and dates on tombstones in local graveyards so they could be posted on the Local Ireland Web site. The couple did it both to promote online genealogy and for the small cut of banner ad revenues they will receive.
Genealogy sites are blooming across Ireland and becoming the latest cottage industry to cater to the Irish diaspora, which includes 70 million people in North America, many of whom are interested in their heritage and make trips to the motherland. According to Irish tourist information, 1 million North Americans visited last year.
Only a tiny portion of Irish genealogical records are accessible online. By comparison, Scotland's General Register has over 25 million searchable entries online, including births, deaths and marriages from 1553 to 1898. But even without access to complete records, the Irish Times' popular Ireland.com site attributes more than 15 percent of revenues to its genealogy section.
Most of the new generation of genealogical sites in Ireland accept electronic requests and then send staff to thumb through records. Celtic Origins, for example, accepts orders via the Web from Irish descendants who pay $50 per hour to have someone manually search genealogical records for their ancestors. CEO Paschal McEvoy, who left a marketing job in Boston to return to his native Ireland last fall, puts brochures in Dublin hotels to market his service.
The country's more established Internet players are already in the genealogy game. Ireland.com features an ancestry section run by professional genealogist John Grenham, regarded as the authoritative figure in the field. And there is Local Ireland, which has a seemingly endless supply of regional information, gathered by hundreds of volunteer "publishers" who contribute historical material from their areas.
"These people are gold dust," says Emmet Kelly, Local Ireland's marketing manager. "You can't buy this information."
Buying genealogical information is new in Ireland, where researching family history traditionally has been an altruistic pursuit. This attitude has somewhat slowed development of genealogy on the Internet. "The ethos of genealogy hasn't been very commercial," says Greenham. Local heritage councils - essentially small, nonprofit volunteer organizations - hold the most valuable records but typically lack the resources to take full advantage of them. The councils have managed to put 80 percent of the Catholic Church's parish registers into computer databases, but the technology was set up so that only insiders can directly access the data.
That protectionist effort, interestingly, was partly commercially motivated. By keeping their computer databases under lock and key, the councils ensure that people tracing their roots will have to visit the Irish towns - thus supporting tourism.
The Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland is fighting the insider-only approach and promoting as much direct access as possible, says Grenham. But he adds that working with local organizations is like "pushing jelly up a hill."
Traditional genealogists such as Eileen O Duil say random information on the Net makes it all too easy for people to jump to false conclusions about their ancestry. That may be true, but if people like Ray and Christi Davis keep traipsing through graveyards, at least the Irish genealogical data on the Web will be a lot more complete.