Irish National Archives has a new site

As of 5th February, there’s been a major refresh of the National Archives websites. There are a lot of changes so buckle up! This post will focus on the main genealogy changes, mostly to the census returns and I’ll do another post about the catalogue as time allows. My review is done in a rush to get information out and I’ll update it as more detail becomes apparent.

Update on 7th February: the following notice has appeared on the old census website, which is back working.

The census search page has had a complete redesign. Here are the headlines:

• To search the 1901/1911 census, go here.
• The urls have all changed. This means any url you have saved needs to be updated. Old ones redirect to the main search page. This also means any links from Ancestry, Findmypast, MyHeritage, and Townlands.ie don’t work right now. It also means links in books are out of date. This will be a lot of work for everyone! I’ll be going through my old blog posts to update as quickly as I can.
• 12/3 update: my initial review noted that transcriptions linked to an individual rather than a household, but I’m pleased to report that the NAI has responded to feedback on this and now have a tab for household transcription as well.
• Search results have a Soundex function. This is great. You will get variant spellings of names in the list of returns unless you select “exact matches only”.
• Updates to corrections and additional scanning has taken place. There’s a list here but I can still see places missed from that list which have been previously reported.
• To search the 19th century census fragments (1821-1851), you now go to a different page.
• The census browse function has moved location and isn’t as easy to find. However, there’s no way to sort by name once you navigate to a location at the moment.
• The Old Age Pension census search forms have not had the refresh yet, so they still work from the same url. Lack of Soundex, etc applies as previously.

---

When you get a list of results now, there are some nice filters to the left. This search was for anyone called Peter Brennan in Ireland in 1911. You can sort by 10, 25 or 100 results. The surname filter shows variants of the name. Other filters drill down by county of origin, religion, DED, age, occupation. Each one shows you them in a list with a number for each set in brackets. This is nice – for example, you’ll be able to see if someone has put “agricultural labourer” but spelled it in an abbreviated way. You can download a list of these results to a .csv file – historians will like this – but it only takes what’s on the current page, not the full set of search results. There’s also a way to share a link to your search results.

When you click on an individual entry, here’s the refreshed look, which is clean and easy to read. There are clear links to the census images and any other relevant pages such as the enumerators abstract, building and out-office returns. They all open in new tabs and also have different urls to previous versions.

At the bottom of that page, you get a transcription showing the other people in the household. Each person can be clicked on to get their own return. The page doesn’t fit on my wide screen display and you need to scroll across.

Here’s some less good news, none of the other genealogical databases are working at the moment but I hope this is teething problems. Update 6/2: the genealogy databases are all back now! But I can’t get institutional returns to load at the moment. Searches with initials don’t work but if you know where a person was before (from an old link), then you can navigate to that location.

I know the NAI web developers are still working away in the background but they will need feedback. There’s no way to send feedback automatically but it’s worth collecting a set of your findings and emailing the NAI directly on query@nationalarchives.ie

---

Update 12/2: A developer called Conor Maguire has built a link conversion tool, which you can access here. Amazing. He also has identified that the new image links are time sensitive, so they won’t work again if you save them. For more on this, see this post in the FB Irish Genealogy group.

Hope you find this post useful! If you are a more visual learner, here is a video I produced on the topic for the International Institute of Genealogical Studies, where I am the Director of Irish Studies.