As a volunteer at NEHGS, my current assignment is to proofread and potentially correct the indexed records of the Massachusetts: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Records, 1789-1900 collection. If you have taken a look at this database, you’ll know that the handwriting in the records varies from “very clear” to “indecipherable.” We have even made use of a “Transcription Challenge,” where we post names from the scanned record book pages and ask users what they think the handwriting represents. Not too surprisingly, the suggested names vary quite a bit amongst themselves.
Contributing to the confusion is that many of the given (first) names in the collection are expressed in Latin form. In other words, the name “Guillimus McCarthy” represents “William McCarthy” in English. However, as we have gone about creating guidelines for converting Latin to English, we’ve seen “Guillimus” spelled in 39 different ways, all of which are believed to represent “William.” So, when we see any of the 39 versions of “Guillimus,” we make the index entry “Guillimus (or other variation), William.” This way, either spelling will be found by our website search engine.
My current assignment is to proof and correct the transcribed records from the parish of Saint Patrick in Lowell, Massachusetts.
We do the same thing with surnames, if the original spelling is clear but seems unusual. A current example is “Whoolihan,” which we enter as “Whoolihan, Hoolihan.” The goal is to give the person doing a search the best chance of finding the record. Then, the searcher can decide if it’s the “correct” record.
My current assignment is to proof and correct the transcribed records from the parish of Saint Patrick in Lowell, Massachusetts. This is a challenging assignment, as the handwriting tends more toward the “indecipherable” end of the spectrum. When such a name appears, I sometimes resort to looking at the Massachusetts: Vital Records, 1841-1910 database.
Attempting to deal with a number of “indecipherable” names (none of which are Latin) in the Saint Patrick birth and baptism records for 1862, I decided to look for individuals with similar surnames, given names, and birth dates in the Massachusetts vital records (VRs) for 1862 Lowell.
The Massachusetts VR birth records for Lowell in 1862 consist of 757 entries on pages 164–81 of record volume 151. I downloaded this set of records from FamilySearch.org (which includes full dates) and compared them to the 371 birth records from Saint Patrick’s parish for the same year. Allowing for minor variation in the surname, given name, and/or complete date, I only found 139 matches. In other words, only about 40% of the births recorded in the church were also recorded by the town.
When we began the Historic Catholic Records Online project in November 2016, we knew that there would be cases where the “church records may be the only existing records for some individuals.” Now that we have digitized well over 455,000 records, it seems there are even more cases than we realized.
Thank you for doing the comparative analysis of the birth and baptism records in Lowell. It is great to have demonstrable proof of the value of this project with the records from the Archdiocese of Boston!
Sam You may also have to look at small neighboring towns. These towns may not have had a Catholic Churches and the residents went to Lowell to worship or the church in there community spoke a language other then their native language. My home town had three big Catholic Churches( Polish, French and Irish). Since the Irish Church was the only one that said the mass in English, everyone other than the Polish and French people went to that church.
There are also some families that recorded births as a tradition in “family” churches even though they no longer lived in that town but older relatives did.
Sorry to make your work harder, but I hope this information helps.
Sam, thank you for your work on this project. Nancy is quite correct about churches being ethnic and about sacraments like Baptism or Marriage being in a church other than the parish church.
The entire mass in Latin was the same in each church until the reforms of Vatican II, but the gospel/epistle and the homily would have been delivered in the language known to the parishioners. I am saying gospel/epistle because we cradle Catholics cannot agree.
My husband and I have discussed the gospel/epistle issue for many hours. I think that he may be correct about a single bible passage in English. I will be interested in what others remember. While I would like it to be two bible passages in English, I fear that he is right as usual. Smile. .
I’ve found a similar situation using New York City vital records and Catholic Church records. There is no record in the Municipal Archives for the marriage of my paternal great grandparents and the birth of one of their children. (I looked through the microfilm myself.) However, I found a record of their marriage and the baptism of the child in sacramental records of their Catholic parish.
Hello, it seems that the French churches of the North East are not on Ancestry. I had to order the microfilm from the Mormons to view the records for Sainte-Anne’s church in Ogdensburg NY. However, it is not possible to order films anymore. What other possibility is there? h
Thank you for your hard work – I used the archdiocese records before they were digitized – writing back and forth to the archivist – and, helpful as he was, it is invaluable to have online access!
As far as I can tell, these Roman Catholic Archdioceses records are the only record of the birth record of my second great grandmother, Catherine T Mullett which helped me find the correct names of her parents, William Mullett and Eleanor Dulley whose marriage records were both in the Roman Catholic & Massachusetts records.