Catholic records project update-- The church register microfilm has been duplicated and records from approximately 147 parishes after 1930 have been edited out. The quality is comparable to the originals at the diocesan office although the books on those originals vary in quality from barely to easily readable. The majority are quite readable. The film sets still have to be compared to each other to be sure they are identical, the finding aid needs development and the boxes need labeling. The project completion date is still sometime this Spring 2002. Complete sets will be available at both the Belleville Public Library and the St. Louis County Library. A finding aid is being developed to ease location of the church most likely to hold the register you might need. Sometime later we hope to post this finding aid to the SCCGS web site with links to the Belleville Diocesan web site which has a map of church locations by county and city. A web page describing the kind of information you might expect to find in the registers is forthcoming. For those unfamiliar with this project, the St. Clair County Genealogical Society obtained permission from the diocese to make duplicate copies of the church registers from archival security microfilm at their office for all parishes in the diocese. This basically covers all of southern Illinois from St. Clair county east and south, about 147 parishes in all. The importance of these records for research purposes includes documentation of birth, baptism, marriage and death during a period when vital statistics were unrecorded at the county or state level, particularly before 1916. Funding for the project comes from the generous donations of individuals (SCCGS members and non-members), with the SCCGS treasury covering the balance. The cost of the project is estimated at $3000.00, of which $750.00 has been collected from donations to date. Donor names appear in the society Quarterly just mailed (24:4, 2002). Contributions may be forwarded to the society c/o Sandi Bennett. Some web sites to help you prepare for the debut of the project follow (may have to *cut and paste* the URLs): Family History Library Research Guidance -- online Latin dictionary and word list [the majority of records are in Latin] http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/rg/frameset_rg.asp?Dest=G1&Aid=&Gid=& Lid=&Sid=&Did=&Juris1=&Event=&Year=&Gloss=&Sub=&Tab=&Entry=&Guide=WLLatin.AS P Diocese of Belleville (great map and contact information) http://www.diobelle.org/parishes/index.html SCCGS web site http://www.compu-type.net/rengen/stclair/stchome.htm St.Louis county library Special Collections web site http://www.slcl.lib.mo.us/slcl/sc/ Belleville Public Library policy and holdings http://www.compu-type.net/rengen/stclair/bpl.htm Possible off-shoots from this project include posting of indexes or abstracts of the data to the web at a URL of the volunteers choice [may include but is not limited to Rootsweb, the St. Clair GenWeb Project pages, the SCCGS web site, personal web sites and Rootsweb Archives]. Such indexes/abstracts would make it easier for researchers to locate a particular event. SCCGS would like to post a 'Project in Progress' web page to keep people up-to-date on such endevours and the URL where posted. If interested in coordinating a particular parish record abstract, please contact me at [email protected] Diane Walsh Catholic Records Project Coordinator