Forum - Parish News Index of Parish Registers

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1. A guest user

   #1 14:21, Thu 10 Feb 2022

   Hello all,

   I am a longtime lurker on the MyParish forum, but first-time poster. I have been working on a digital version of Phillimore's Atlas of parish registers. As a test, I have entered all of Phillimore's data on indexes for parishes in Wales into a service called Wikidata (an open repository for linked data), exported the results and built a custom map showing the locations of, and dates covered by, the parish registers.

   You can find the very first demo of this website at this link:

   http://earlymoderndigital.atwebpages.com/Records.html

   There are several ideas behind this project:

   1. To establish a fully searchable index of parish records in mainland Britain

   2. To visualise the data found in sources like Phillimore and perhaps local archive catalogues 

   3. To make use of Wikidata as an open repository for parish-based information: allowing for spin-off projects that can use data collected by others

   Ideally, I'd like to extend this project by entering all of Phillimore's data into Wikidata and then moving on to include more detailed information from local archival catalogues. 

   If members of the forum have any ideas on what features might be useful in this project, or if you'd like to get involved in a spinoff project that use the same techniques, please reply. I hope this website, and the data structures I am using, can be the basis for a number of projects that might be of interest to members.

   I hope members of the forum see the value in these first baby steps!

   All the best,

   Chris R. Langley 

   Newman University, Birmingham 

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2. Joseph Chick Staff History

   #2 10:06, Fri 11 Feb 2022

   Thanks, Chris. This is looking like a really useful project. Perhaps it could be combined with Valerie Hitchman's churchwardens' accounts database at some point so that it could map both parish registers and churchwardens' accounts:

   https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/myparish/projects/cwa/#Using

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3. A guest user

   #3 13:04, Thu 17 Feb 2022

   Thanks for this, Joe. Interestingly, the parish lists on Valerie's CW page are actually provided by Wikidata: the connected service I've been using to capture a lot of this data. It should mean that the CW data can be added to this dataset without much trouble. 

   It could then be visualised in various ways. 

   To quote the film "Jaws": we may need a bigger boat...

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