Boston, Mass., Jan 12, 2017 / 03:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- If you've been wanting to learn more about your family tree, a new online database is making the search easier with digitized Catholic parish records in the Boston area dating from 1789-1900.
Announced on Tuesday, the New England Historic Genealogical Society has partnered with the Archdiocese of Boston, collaborating their resources with the church’s sacramental records in an effort to create a mega treasury of information available to the public online.
“The whole 19th century was a time of waves of immigration to Boston, and this project will make it easier to study that era and for people to trace their family history back to Europe,” said Jean Maguire, the genealogical society’s library director, according to the Catholic Herald.
“We have a lot of parishes to cover,” Maguire said, referencing the 150 parishes that will be included in the database.
The digitizing project began when the Boston archdiocese’s archivist, Thomas Lester, noticed the wear and decay on some of the Church’s older records – some of which are over 200 years old.
“Pages are brittle and flaking, bindings are coming unstitched, some are just falling apart. Of course, we try to restore them, but we can’t do it fast enough,” Lester said.
“So we looked into scanning all of them, that way if we can’t save books we can at least save the information.”
According to the genealogical society, the project will tackle 400,000 hand-written pages and 10 million names, with plans to digitize about 5,000 volumes of the Church’s index records. The online database will also eventually include information from every parish in the Boston archdiocese, even the parishes which no longer exist.
“We work…to conserve any damaged volumes, evaluate records, decipher obscure entries, and carefully guide our transcriptionists so their work is as accurate as possible,” the NEHGS stated on their site.
“This painstaking process ensures faithful transcriptions – a critical factor for family historians and researchers.”
According to both organizations, this is the biggest parish record digitizing project within any single U.S. diocese.
Most of the documents have been recorded in Latin, although the immigration period influenced documentation in other languages, including Italian, French and Polish.
The program will also include a companion website, which will host information about the early growth of Catholicism in Boston. It also details the history of persecution, integration, and the establishment of the Church in New England, complete with a timeline, photos, and maps of the area.
As the records are uploaded onto the site, families who are curious about their ancestors will be able to find traces of their history through sacramental records, which offers information about names and dates, including marriage witnesses or baptismal godparents.
Currently, the database has published the sacramental records from four parishes online in a volume-by-volume format, which includes documents from the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Holy Trinity, Immaculate Conception, and Our Lady of Victories. These records mainly include marriage certificates, baptismal records, death census, and confirmation recordings.
To make the search easier, the site has included an instructional video to guide the users, and there are also plans to make a “search by name” feature available by the end of the year.
Looking forward, the archivists believe it will take a few years to fully complete the digitizing process.
Currently, the records online are being offered for free, but as more information becomes available, users will need a paid membership to the genealogical society.
Article Archive
Looking for family history? Boston archdiocese is digitizing Catholic records
Related Articles • More Articles
null / Credit: ShutterstockWashington, D.C. Newsroom, May 2, 2024 / 18:20 pm (CNA).The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) released a pair of emergency rules that it said are aimed at combating "misinformation" and a "deeply dishonest scare campaign" by the Biden administration about the state's new six-week pro-life law. The rules, published on May 1, establish guidance for lifesaving measures and clarify that certain procedures, including treatment for ectopic pregnancies, are not considered abortion and remain legal under the Florida Heartbeat Protection Act, which went into effect on Wednesday. This comes amid significant criticism over the state's pro-life law that prohibits abortions on women after six weeks of pregnancy except for in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger. The new AHCA rules further clarify those exceptions. "The agency finds there is an immediate danger to th...
Oviedo Archbishop Jesús Sanz Montes accused the government of focusing "in a biased and manipulative way on the problem of pedophilia as something attributable only to the Catholic Church." / Credit: Archdiocese of OviedoACI Prensa Staff, May 2, 2024 / 18:50 pm (CNA)."They have done it again. It is a kind of obsessive mantra every time they need a smokescreen to distract from the real problems we have and to which they so clumsily and insidiously apply their tortuous governance."That is how the archbishop of Oviedo, Jesús Sanz Montes, began a letter released this week titled "The Accusing Rattle" in which he responds to the socialist government's announcement of an exclusive plan to address sexual and power abuses committed within the Catholic Church.In the opinion of the prelate, the country's executive "has tried to focus in a biased and manipulative way on the problem of pedophilia as something attributable only to the Catholic Church, which represents an exclusive...
Pope Francis meets with 300 priests taking part in the World Meeting of Parish Priests on May 2, 2024, at the Vatican. / Credit: Vatican MediaRome Newsroom, May 2, 2024 / 12:41 pm (CNA).Pope Francis published a letter on Thursday addressed to all parish priests in the world with his advice for building a missionary Church in which all the baptized share in the mission of proclaiming the Gospel."Parish communities increasingly need to become places from which the baptized set out as missionary disciples and to which they return, full of joy, in order to share the wonders worked by the Lord through their witness," Pope Francis wrote in the letter published on May 2.The pope presented the letter to 300 priests participating in the Synod on Synodality's "World Meeting of Parish Priests" during an audience at the Vatican, saying that their meeting is "an opportunity to remember in my prayers all of the parish priests in the world to whom I address these words with great affection."P...