In a message dated 12/31/2007 3:18:06 AM Eastern Standard Time, irish-new-york-city-request@rootsweb.com writes: > My idea of the master index being at the chancery and only charging > $2 an item would protect privacy because it would be retained by the > Church only and not online for everyone. Since the master index would > be a computerized list it should not take but a second to find John > Smith married Marry Brown in 1853 at St. Parish B. Then you write St. > Parish B with the index citation and get a copy for $10, $20 and it > is as private then as it was today under the current retrieval > system. It is just a lot faster. > Hello. Compiling such a central index for the entire Archdiocese since its inception for all Births Marriages and Deaths would be an exercise of enormous scale (if feasible at all) and require major funding which the Archdiocese is not likely to commit for such a project. Even if completed a central index would not solve the problems of then getting the local parishes to respond to requests for searches. Parish staffs these days struggle just to provide the essential services to parishioners, even $20.00 per search wouldn't be cost effective and they couldn't use volunteers without getting back to the privacy issue! To create the Index, every parish register would have to be accessed and transcribed in which case it would make more sense to enter every record in its entirety into the database and simply create the master index from that. The Archdiocese would then have access to not only the Index but the actual record data so that requesting a search and content of the record if found could be "one stop shopping" for the researcher. The cost per search/record and the effort to establish one's relationship and therefore "right" to get a copy of the private record would probably be significant but perhaps worth it for researchers otherwise"stuck". I'm not sure that preservation of extremely old records from long defunct parishes would be a focus for the Archdiocese anyway, what use would they be to them beyond the life span of the individuals concerned and any need to report to the civil authority? G. McC ************************************** See AOL's top rated recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)