It has been mentioned that there are privacy concerns but isn't the point of wedding banns a public announcement to see if anyone knows why these two people can't get married? If they had no privacy three weeks before the wedding how do they have an absolute right to privacy today? Baptisms and illegitimacy are different but marriage is public. There may be a handful of exceptions but since the US is not and has not been a totalitarian society, I doubt there are any "secret marriages" that might have occurred in ancient Rome or elsewhere. It has also been suggested that if a wedding went unrecorded then the Church would provide details for that marriage to the City not the public. Since most of the registers are not public we do not know how many went unrecorded but St. Raphael on West 41st Street is available through the FHL. I photocopied weddings between September 1, 1886 when they began at St. Raphael through 1908. Out of the total of 1,508 weddings listed in the marriage register at St. Raphael’s, only 480 were also registered with the NYC Department of Health; this is a mere 31.8%. During the first 7 1/3 years not a single one of St. Raphael’s weddings was recorded with the city. One can only imagine that the numbers are similar if not worse in other parishes. Since the City has made their marriage records public from 1853-1937 it is a moot point that the Church won't do that. If the Church turned in the registers today any marriage from before 1938 at least would be made public by the City. There is no if about it. Many if not most Catholic weddings went unrecorded with the proper civil authorities. As far as the manpower, it will take the time it needs. If we get a lot of volunteers it would take less time. Catholic records are pretty short in the 19th-century; Groom married Bride with Witness 1 Witness 2 by Priest. That is going to be 95% of the marriages. That would not take much time. Having typed in the stuff for grooms and naturalizations myself on the IGG it was not very time consuming. I think the index would be best if privacy is a concern. If it is not a real issue then microfilming is the way to go. Catholics are the largest group of Christians in the USA and the second largest group of Christians is people who used to be Catholic. That would mean that many if not most of America has at least some ancestor in the Catholic sacramental records of NYC. If the parishes don't have the staff to search for events that the researcher is not sure took place there then how is the status quo fixing that? Yes, I have 5 marriages I am searching for and no date of marriage and no exact place. Just addresses from the city directory and census. If I write to parish A and get the run around, do I stop or write to parish B? If parish A is the actual place of the wedding, then how does stonewalling me help anyone? All it does is send the pushy genealogist on to the next parish and so on and so on. If they would each index or allow their marriage records to be indexed, then the right parish could be identified from the resulting master index which could be kept at the chancery. That would preserve privacy, eliminate goose chases and infuse some cash into the archdiocese and her parishes. Since other dioceses have allowed the filming of their records then this is not a matter of it is forbidden like using milk instead of wine at Mass. This is a choice and it seems a bit wrong to say that the records that legally were supposed to be turned a century ago are now "private". If Chicago is filmed and all of Ireland too, then why not NYC? This is not a dogma or doctrine that is preventing easier access to the records. It is hubris and apparently the news stories the last five years have not brought about the humility one would expect. Father "X" told me records are for the living. I disagree and assert that records are to reveal the present to the future. We are the future of those records were created for. They ask why is it such a big deal that you know all this stuff? Fair enough, I can give a logical answer. I ask back though, why is it such a big deal that your prevent me from learning these details? They spend more time stonewalling than they would simply to do the search and either issue the certificate or a letter saying it was not found there. People just want to find their ancestors' records. It would be a good gesture if the archdiocese moved forward making these records more accessible. Is that really too much to ask?