familiar with parish records? I'd love to hear from you!

[djmontgomery]

hello everyone
I'm new to this forum so please bear with me.
I have recently begun a new project with the Church of England to make better use of the Church's vast archives of historical records. As you're probably aware, each parish generally owns and keeps its own records which of course makes life a bit challenging for genealogical research. What we're trying to do is to begin centralizing a process for getting parish records online and searchable, with a church goal of reconnecting people with their communities and historic family churches.

Anyhow - what I'm doing at the moment is identifying 'pilot' parishes and deaneries we could work with as we begin the project.
To that end, I thought I would simply throw a line out on this forum. If you are into this whole subject of genealogy and particularly the history of your local parish records, I'd love to hear from you. Particularly if you are in Winchester, Chichester, London or Guildford dioceses. But really anywhere in the country would be good to hear from.

Feel free to PM me to connect or ask me anything more.
Best wishes to all,
Darren M

[peterd]

A lot of parish records can be found here mixture of UK and US

http://archive.org/search.php?query=PAR ... pe%3Atexts

[linell]

Have you seen the Mormon Family Search Site? County Record Offices hold what Parish Registers are available locally. HTH Linell.

[Northern Lass]

Thanks Darren

moving this to Misc section

All Saints Sedgley would be great ............and if you could then put the Database of them up
online somewhere it would help with a few I need

[djmontgomery]

thanks everyone, appreciate the replies.
Yes some records are available online right now. It's a bit piecemeal, each records office may handle it differently.
What we're trying to do is see if we can establish a more standard way for the church to do this, perhaps with a single partner. Make it more useful for the public and more manageable for the church.
It's early days, I'm still very much in a mode of building my understanding
cheers
Darren

[peterd]

the online parish clerk seems to have made a good start if you had these onboard it would make a good starting point ?

would also help if you could get the catholic church involved as they also have vast records untouched

might be a lot easier if there were programmes around that could help or decipher text when the original document is scaned this would help any one who has to proof read it and type it up ?

[SRD]

I'm wary of that phrase "perhaps with a single partner", it inevitably means that someone will be making a profit from records we've already paid for in one way or another and that access to those records will be limited. That's the benefit of the Online Parish Clerk project, it's free to all.