Irish prison registers to be released

FindmyPast Ireland (www.findmypast.ie) will be releasing a major collection this weekend, and Claire Santry has suggested that it will be the Irish prison registers on her Irish Genealogy News blog at http://irish-genealogy-news.blogspot.com/2011/10/prison-releases-this-week.html.

I suspected this was to be the release, but there has been no official confirmation as yet. Like Claire, I know little about the source, other than the fact that in February Eneclann's Brian Donovan announced in America at the RootsTech conference that the collection was being digitised (see http://scottishancestry.blogspot.com/2011/02/forthcoming-irish-developments.html). The records will apparently contain the names of 4-6 million people from across the 19th century, including victims and their families, though Claire provides a more formal date range of 1790-1924.

If you have Irish ancestors, now might be a good time to pray that some of them were bad boys - if so, you may find out more about them imminently!

(With thanks to Claire, Audrey Collins for the RootsTech news, and the BI-Gen blog)

Chris