RCB Library Notes22 Sep 17

Dr Susan Hood at PRONI Launch of Digitized Church Records

On Friday 22nd September 2017, Dr Susan Hood, Librarian and Archivist of the RCB Library in Dublin, participated in a launch event of digitized church records at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast. The event was also streamed via the PRONI website and the talks are now available online here.

Digitized records dating from 1642 from 15 churches are now available to view on–site in PRONI. Dr Susan Hood for the Church of Ireland was joined by the Revd Robin Roddie, Archivist for the Methodist Historical Society.

Dr Hood said, ‘The Church of Ireland is particularly indebted to PRONI for taking on the task of digitizing the registers of its parishes in Northern Ireland, thereby making them more accessible and discoverable for others. We hope that this positive collaboration will continue so that more collections of registers can be captured digitally in due course.’

PRONI’s significant holding of church records are extensively used by those undertaking family and local history research.  PRONI is undertaking an ongoing project to digitize church records which are still held by churches.  Some of those records that we have copied were previously available on microfilm but the microfilm copies are now worn or damaged.  The digitization is undertaken in–house by PRONI’s experienced reprographics technicians.  The project is only possible because of the co–operation of churches who agree to deposit their records with us on a temporary basis and agree to make them publically available in a controlled manner.

For the full list of church registers (both Church of Ireland and Methodist) digitized to date at PRONI, please click here.