FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) has added two new additions this week for Northern Ireland and Scotland:
- 497,172 death record transcriptions from 1980-2024 added to the Scotland, Modern and Civil Deaths & Burials 1855-2024 collection.
- 28,292 additions to a new Ireland, Northern Ireland Deaths 1980-2024 database.
Comment: I'll be honest, at first I felt a bit queasy seeing the index entry for my father who died in Scotland just 3 years ago. The information lists his name, town and county of death, and his birth and death dates. The source is given as "MiExact Ltd", the website for which at https://miexact.com denotes them as handling "Mortality and wills intelligence, events, data insights & data management solutions for the UK charity & commercial sectors."
This seems to be a similar sort of harvested data presentation as offered by Ancestry through its Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2022 collection, the source of which is GreyPower Deceased Data. compiled by Wilmington Millennium, West Yorkshire. This site too offes my father's death entry, with practically the same information returned.
However, on reflection it is not the fact that my father's death is noted there that bothers me - after all, it did happen three years ago, and there's an index entry for him on ScotlandsPeople, which hosts the state's official death records, and through which I can purchase copies of his death record. For genealogical purposes it will of course be helpful too. But I think what bugs me slightly about this is that a commercial company has an index of records including those up to 2024, and from a few test searches, the records appear to go up to January 2024 - in other words, there will be people included in this new database who have literally just passed away four months ago. At least on Ancestry there is a buffer zone of a couple of years for thiose who may be grieveing.
Perhaps a slight tweak to this might make it a bit more tasteful, FindmyPast?
Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For purchase in tthe USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, on Threads at @scottishgenesblog and via Mastodon at https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGENES.
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