Two
of Boston's most venerable institutions are teaming up to create an
online database of hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic Church
documents to help people trace their family histories.
The New
England Historic Genealogical Society and the Archdiocese of Boston on
Tuesday announced the project that was first talked about two years ago.
It's the first time a significant number of sacramental records from
any U.S. diocese have been digitized on this scale, the organizations
said.
The plan is to digitize and index records from 1789 to 1900 from all
the parishes in the archdiocese, even those that no longer exist.
They
are about 5,000 volumes to digitize, some as many as 500 pages, said
Thomas Lester, the archivist and records manager for the archdiocese.
Lester noticed when he first took the job a couple of years ago that
the parish sacramental records were among the most frequently
referenced.
But the downside of that was the wear and tear it caused to already crumbling documents.
"Pages are brittle and flaking, bindings are coming unstitched, some
are just falling apart," he said. "Of course we try to restore them, but
we can't do it fast enough. So we looked into scanning all of them,
that way if we can't save the books we can at least save the
information."
He talked to Jean Maguire at the genealogical society.
Established in 1845, it is the premier national resource for
genealogists and family historians and already home to more than 28
million items, including records from other New England churches, said
Maguire, the society's library director.
So far, the records from four churches are available online, but they
include some of the most significant churches in archdiocese history,
including the mother church, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, as well as
now-closed Holy Trinity—also known as the German Church—and Our Lady of
Victories, the first French parish in Boston.
The records already online are available to browse for free. As more
are posted, a paid membership to the genealogical society will be
required.
The records include baptisms, marriages, confirmations, ordinations, first communions and other pivotal life events.
They include important clues to family history. For example, marriage records often include the names of witnesses and baptism records include the names of godparents.
The majority of the records are in Latin, but because many Catholic
churches were established for a particular immigrant group, some are
also in Italian, French, Polish and other languages.
"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," Maguire said.
Records searchable by name will be available later this year, but it may ultimately take years to complete the project.
"We have a lot of parishes to cover," Maguire said.