A small piece of history was made in  the Health Board’s offices at Grogan’s Road in Wexford on November 29^th . On that day the registers of birth and death ceased as the method of recording  key life events.  These registers were first opened  in January 1864 following an act of Parliament which required the registering of  all deaths, births and marriages. Since 1864 a total of 1570 registers have been created in the Wexford district and they now contain over a half a million registrations of the births , deaths and marriages of Wexford people. Starting on November 29^th 2004 these events will  be recorded electronically and members of the public will, in future, be invited to  digitially encode their signatures via  epad technology when making registrations.  

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 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 a 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.  Parents  will soon have the option of registering a child’s birth in the hospital prior to bringing the baby home. This 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.  

The closure of the registers at the Wexford office represents a major milestone for the registration staff who have had to learn a new technology and a new way of doing business. While they will miss the elegance of a well scripted certificate and the statutory black ink pen, they know that the public will receive a better and a faster service.  

Sheila White, Senior Registrar who has worked in the service for a number of years, says, ‘we will miss our registers but hope to have more time to  focus on the accuracy and quality of the data which we obtain from the public.Our aim is to provide a quality service and this means that every encounter by the public with us must be a good one. 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 must use our service’.