Sunday, July 5, 2009

Limerick Burial Records and California Digital Newspaper Collection

Limerick Burial Records Online (Reported in Eastman's Online Newsletter)
Burial records for the City's largest cemetery, Mount Saint Lawrence, dating back to 1855 are accessible on the internet free of charge.
The newspaper article with the announcement is at:
http://www.limerickleader.ie/news/City-records-online-decision-is.5348402.jp
The images from the burial register are at:
http://www.limerickcity.ie/Press/LimerickBurialRegisterOnline/
They aren't indexed.

Irish research has certainly changed over the last few years. First the National Archives decided to post images and indexes for the surviving census records (online at no charge). Hopefully other city councils will make their burial records freely available the way Limerick has. It's a far cry from the 1980s when local heritage centres offered us printouts for an exorbitant fee of indexing done by unemployed youth and we were denied access to original records.

California Digital Newspaper Collection (reported in Eastman's Online Newsletter)
A collection of California newspapers is online at: http://cdnc.ucr.edu/
A successful search on this database will give you a list of hits. Then when you click on a hit you have the option of seeing a transcript of the relevant section. This gives you a fast way of determining whether it is worth your time to download the image of the page.

Thank you to Toronto Branch for this info.

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