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Findmypast.com is making a huge effort to build what will become the largest online archive of Catholic Church Records from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The archive will ultimately have approximately 100 million online, digitized records.
Quoting from the website's description of the collection:
An introduction to the collection
The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination in the world. Despite popular belief that it has few adherents in Britain and the US, it has always been a significant component (up to 25%) of the population. It has some of the oldest and best preserved genealogical records ever created, however they have never been easy to use. Until now.
Findmypast has launched a ground breaking initiative to digitize these historic records of the Catholic Church. Millions of Irish records are already online, and they're being joined by the sacramental registers of England, Scotland and the US. Our first three Archdioceses alone (Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore) contain 30 million records, and that is just a part of this collection.
The sorts of records you are likely to find include:
- Baptisms
- Marriages
- Deaths & Burials
- Census and more
We are commencing this project with the Registers for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in the USA and the Archdioceses of Birmingham and Westminster in England. The Philadelphia records start back in 1757, while those for Westminster and Birmingham in 1657.
Most of these records have never been accessible before by the public - either offline or online. We have developed a close collaboration with the Catholic Church to bring these millions of centuries-old records and images to your fingertips for the first time ever.These records have already begun to appear online and will ultimately provide an insight into records that have not previously been available.
When Find My Past put the Philadelphia Catholic Parish records online, I was always disappointed from many searches, as my grandmother's family was nowhere to be found! When you posted the article this morning. I thought to check again, but without much enthusiasm, and lo and behold - I easily found them. FMP, it seems, has been recently adding & updating this database.
ReplyDeleteThank you James Tanner!! I have a link to your blog on my desktop. One of the first items I check each morning.