A press release issued last week from the Representative Church Body (RCB) Library provides the nearest we’ve seen to a progress report about the Church of Ireland Parish Registers Digitization Project in four years. You can read it here.

Some contect and background… The RCB Library is the custodian of the surviving historical parish registers of the Church of Ireland, the vast majority of which have been accessible only tp researchers visiting the Library, which is based in Churchtown, Dublin 14. After decades of thumbing by zealous genealogists and historians, some of these have become very fragile, making their digitisation increasingly urgent.

In September 2018, the Library confirmed (see IGN blogpost) that state funding had been secured to start such a project and this would be carried out in-house and would result in the digital registers being freely available online, possibly on genealogy.ie (a free, state funded and managed database).

No timescale was given and no progress updates have since been provided to the public. I did, however, come across a report* from the RCB Library which outlined some of the behind-the-scenes steps taken in 2018-2019. These included the procurement and installation of a Lizard Book Scanner, the satisfactory completion of a 4-month pilot scanning programme that resulted in about 250 volumes of scanned registers, and the development and customisation of transcription software. It concluded that indexing of the data was…