In a message dated 12/29/2007 3:20:56 AM Eastern Standard Time, irish-new-york-city-request@rootsweb.com writes: > > 2008 is the Bicentennial of the Archdiocese. There's a lot going on > including an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York and a Bicentennial > History. Maybe this is the time to ask again about the parish records. I've had > a difficult time too and have yet to get a marriage record. I did get some > baptismal records (just a letter, no certificates) from St. Paul's on East > 117th Street which was a real breaththrough - they were for the 1850s and this > information can't be found in the civil records (I looked at the Municipal > Archives). It took me two tries to get this and yes, I send a donation and a > SASE. > > I think it could be a win/win - the parish would get some added revenue and > we would get the records we need. > Hi. With due respect to those who would like to see these records available online I can think of few things less likely to happen. Church policy has always supported the law in reporting vital records as required to Civil Authorities but beyond that legal mandate, its equally firm commitment has been to protect the individuals receiving its sacraments and keep its own records private and it is entitled to do that. If individual priests failed to comply 100% in reporting and if it could be proved a particular record was not provided, then the churches only obligation would surely be to provide that record to the civil authorities not to the public! The strong and rapidly growing trend these days in many states both in this country and abroad is towards passing laws to make all presently public vital records much less accessible in the interests of homeland security and irrespective of the age of the record. That loss will be of much greater significance to genealogists and focus on addressing that threat is much more urgent (and feasible) than attempting to get the Archdiocese to change its longstanding policy and buck the tide now flowing strongly against disclosure even in the civil arena. Offers of assistance to the Archdiocese in preserving and compiling its records and making them more easily searchable by them in answering legitimate enquiries might be welcomed so long as the privacy of the records was protected in the transcription/scanning process and I would not expect that to result in copies of entire registers becoming publically available. Historically,many churches and civil authorities did allow access and copying in return for the provision of complete microfilmed records and later found their records had been misused. Few present day parishes have the resources to handle requests for records (especially old records or those of now defunct parishes) for other than the most pressing official reasons and see no neccessity to search for hours to satisfy curiosity (as they see it) especially if the event is not known for sure to have occured in that parish in the first place. The manpower hours to do such a project, would be astronomical, just getting the 1930 census ready for online use required every name being transcribed seperately by two individuals and then compared and every discrepancy was then reviewed by a third person for resolution! Those were public records with no privacy concerns! A very large grant from a charitable organization to fund compilation and preservation of all parish records for the archdiocese and made to an organization capable of mounting such an initiative, recruiting the volunteers and establishing quality control would be the way to approach this rather than trying to pressure the Archdiocese. Even then expectation of greater access as a result should be realistic! Just my 2 cents Gwen McC. NJ ************************************** See AOL's top rated recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)