News
26th January
2012
Future Northern Irish Death Registrations to Note Parents’ Names
CIGO’s long-running campaign to improve data recorded in Irish death registrations across the island of Ireland looks finally to be fulfilled in 2012! With the passing of the Civil Registration Act 2004, from the 5th December 2005 informants in death registrations in the Republic of Ireland have been required to provide the names of the deceased’s parents. This change was only secured when CIGO appealed to the then Minister for Social Welfare, Mary Coughlan TD, drawing her attention to the fact that the United Nations had had long promoted the need for universal registration of “vital” events and had produced a ‘Model Civil Registration Law’ to assist developing Third World countries!
The General Register Office of Northern Ireland (GRONI) had been slow to move on this issue, but the campaign received a huge boost in 2009 when CIGO’s two executive liaison officers appeared before the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Finance & Personnel Scrutiny Committee to give evidence about civil registration practices in Northern Ireland. The executive liaison officers, Steven Smyrl and Robert Davison, made an extremely convincing case for Northern Ireland to follow the Republic’s lead and to begin noting the name of each deceased person’s mother and father.
In its subsequent report the scrutiny committee included the future noting of parents’ names in Northern Ireland death registrations as one of its “key recommendations” and which GRONI then accepted in principle. In January this year GRONI notified CIGO that new registration regulations are to be drafted for implementation later this year and which will include provision for noting parents’ names in all future deaths registered in Northern Ireland. The system is to be modelled on that in place in Scotland since 1855 and which is ‘voluntary’ and only requires informants to provide information they have knowledge of.
Across Britain and Ireland, this now only leaves England & Wales to recognise the value of, and commit to, this important provision for future generations, let alone future genealogists! In this regard, CIGO’s Steven Smyrl recently remarked with some wit “that in 1999 when trying to secure the backing of Sinn Fein for the Northern Ireland devolved assembly, former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, announced “we’ve jumped…now you follow!”. And on the important issue of noting parents’ names in death registrations, as the Irish have now finally followed the Scots and “jumped” …could the English & Welsh please follow?”
10th January
2012
Latest Newsletter available from Cape Town Family History Society
Read it here CTFHSDec2011
3rd January
2012
US newspaper Irish Echo carries a piece on CIGO's 1926 Census Campaign
It hardly matters now whose fault it was. It happened.Two opposing sets of patriots, both believing they had right on their side, destroyed the Public Records Office at the Four Courts in June 1922. And in the process, they set alight much of Ireland’s historical memory. Other disasters, including an extraordinary act of bureaucratic bungling in the late 19th century, meant that independent Ireland began its existence with a greatly reduced set of official records. Read rest here.
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