BOSTON (AP) – 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.