The end of handwritten parish registers

Sunday, 22 January 2012 00:59

According to the newspaper "Aura Avis" is now an almost 400 years long tradition of handwritten parish registers comming to an end. For future genealogists it will thus be even easier to find ancestors in the historical record.

This transition from paper to computer will do the job for the National Archives much easier. Scanning of the individual sites will cease, and searchable databases will be far more common. Today, nearly 4 million parish pages is indexed and published in "Digitalarkivet".

Presumably, Only a few of us who are looking for ancestors as of today receive no pleasure from today's church books. Due to block limits, which are due to privacy reasons, many of the data from the present parish registers will only be available in about 60 years.

The the newspaper "Aura Avis" says communications director of the Church Council, Trude Evenshaug, that a good number of churches as a trial filled the information on computer and then sticking prints into the church book.