Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations (CIGO)

Paddy Waldron

CIGO (Est. 1992) is a forum for voluntary (not-for-profit) organisations involved in genealogical research in Ireland (32 counties).
13 member organisations in Ireland (Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland; Blessington Family History Society; Certificate Genealogists' Alumni Group; Clare Roots Society; Cork Genealogical Society; East Clare Heritage; Irish Family History Society; Irish Genealogical Research Society; Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Irish section); North of Ireland Family History Society; Raheny Heritage Society; Western Family History Association; Wicklow County Genealogical Society)
21 overseas based organisations, throughout the English-speaking world.
Aims:
- To provide a forum for family history and genealogical groups and societies which share an interest in Irish research.
- To encourage, foster and promote greater public knowledge of and access to records relevant to genealogists, whether held by Civil, Ecclesiastical, or private bodies.
- To formulate, influence and co-ordinate policy on all issues of concern to member organisations.
- To encourage membership of CIGO by both Irish and overseas genealogical and family history organisations.
- To recognise achievement in Irish genealogy through its annual Award for Excellence in Genealogy.
Further details at www.cigo.ie

CIGO evolved from GRO-users group and influenced Civil Registration legislation, North and South.
Add pre-1920 marriages and pre-1924 deaths to the GRO's internal computer database.
Make the computer database available to the public in the Irish Life Centre and the local offices.
Make it available via the Internet.
Exploit the FamilySearch.org pre-1959 index.
End the 'five photocopies per day' rule and extend opening hours.
Cost of EUR4 per photocopy compares unfavourably with GBP1.17 per online image for the equivalent service in Scotland.
Who is responsible for registering divorces?
Some coroners are not investigating parents' names when registering deaths.

CIGO welcomes the free provision of the 1901 and 1911 censuses.
Respect feedback: Transcription errors should be fixed as they are reported.
CIGO campaigned for many years for the release of the 1926 census.
CIGO welcomes the new government's commitment to release this census, whether in unredacted or redacted form.

CIGO welcomes the free provision of records for some counties at irishgenealogy.ie and the promised digitisation of parish register microfilms in the National Library of Ireland.
There is still no countywide online access to records for counties such as Clare.
Cost of EUR5 per transcript from IFHF at rootsireland.ie compares most unfavourably with GBP1.17 per online image for superior service in Scotland.
The IFHF policy that (free) ``access will be limited at the discretion of the IFHF and its member centres'' and ``a high volume of searches without the purchase of any records will lead to disabling of your account'' is doing untold damage to the international reputation of the Irish genealogy sector.
Post-1880 registers need to be imaged and conserved now.

CIGO participated in representations to the previous government concerning possible work opportunity schemes in genealogy, as part of the semi-economic sector.
These included working towards many of the objectives set out above.
Encourage and co-ordinate volunteer efforts and voluntary organisations, e.g. Ireland Reaching Out, familysearch.org, clarelibrary.ie, Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives, ...
How can genealogy tourism fund the provision and dissemination of genealogical records and the development of genealogical services?

What other historical records could be published? Wartime Population Register (rationing register)?
What new genealogical records are being created today? Electoral registers? Phone books? facebook.com?
Don't allow data protection advocates to prevent or hamper genealogical research.
Centralised genealogy hub in the House of Lords, College Green?
Link the records to possible or probable matches:
- marriages to baptisms (Canon Law since c.1918)
- civil records of marriages and deaths to births
- divorces to marriages
- 1901 census to 1911 census
- baptisms to civil births
- ancestry.com does it
Bi-lingual databases and bi-lingual searches: Irish/English (e.g. census), Latin/English (parish registers)
In the era of cloud computing, there appears to be no uniquely Irish equivalent of the popular sites for entering or uploading family trees, such as tribalpages.com, ancestry.com, genesreunited.co.uk, worldconnect.rootsweb.ancestry.com, geni.com, myheritage.com
The Irish Family Tree online? Wiki? Social network? Tourist magnet?
mayo.ie is the only approximation to this idea