The end of an era was marked at  the SOUTH EASTERN Health Board’s offices at The Cork Road in Waterford  on Dec 6th ²⁰⁰⁴. On that day the book was closed on the last manually written registers in use to record birth and death for the districts of Tramore and Waterford.  These registers were started in January 1864 following an act of Parliament which required the registering of  all deaths, births and marriages. Since 1864 a total of 700 registers have been created in the Waterford City district and they now contain over a quarter of  a million registrations of the births , deaths and marriages that occured in Waterford . In future these events will  be recorded electronically and members of the public will, be invited to  digitially encode their signatures via  epad technology when registering a birth, death or marriage.  

John Hogan SEHB Superintendent Registrar says, "These changes are part of the modernisation of the state civil registration service which is administered by the General Resistrar’s office of the Department of Health and Children and the Health Boards. This project has been working for the past few years and all birth registrations since 1900 has been entered on to a national data base. Similiarly all death registration information since 1966 and marriages since 1950 have been electronically recorded. This means that it is now possible to obtain one's birth certificate in any registration office in the state from Letterkenny to Dungarvan."  

Another benefit of the modernisation programme will be for the parents of new born children. It will mean that the process of obtaining child benefit payment for a first child will be easier and a birth certificate will no longer be required. In the case of a second or subsequent child the child benefit payment will be automatically added to the existing child benefit once registration has taken place. In 2005, it is planned that parents  will  have the option of registering a child’s birth in the hospital prior to bringing the baby home.  

The closure of the registers at the Waterford  office represents a major milestone for the registration staff who have learned a new technology and a new way of doing business. While many will miss the elegance of a well scripted certificate and the statutory black ink pen, these changes will ensure that the public will receive a better and a faster service.  

Margaret Farrell, Senior Registrar who has worked in the service for a number of years, says, ‘while there is nostalgia for the old registers we will  have more time now to  focus on the accuracy and quality of the data which we obtain from the public. Our aim is to provide a service where every encounter by the public with us will be both efficient and friendly. Registering a death, birth or marriage are major events in any person’s life and our aim is to make these experiences positive ones for those people who use this service’.