John Grenham evaluates the Irish Catholic parish record transcripts

In his latest blog post John Grenham looks at How good are the new Ancestry/FindMyPast Catholic transcripts?
I had not been aware that the indexing was a cooperative project between Ancestry and Findmypast. That fact is obscured by the subtleties of the search engines used by the two companies, notably different treatment of surname variants.
Grenham points to a case study where a large number of variants were not caught by the indexing, perhaps in part as the indexing was done from poor quality microfilm copy. Just because you don't find someone doesn't mean they weren't there - so goes the game of genealogical hide and seek with indexed records.