Findmypast Announces Plans to Publish Kent County Council’s Collection of Original Parish Registers
- Findmypast to publish original Kent parish registers online for the first time
- Kent County Council has begun digitisation and records will be available to search, exclusively on Findmypast, later in 2018
- The new additions will join Findmypast’s existing Kent collections to form the most comprehensive online archive of Kent parish registers in the world
Leading family history website Findmypast today announces a new partnership with Kent County Council that will result in the digitisation and online publication of thousands of Anglican parish registers from across the county.
The new online collections will be created from over 2,500 handwritten parish registers dating from the early 16th century up to 1918. The registers are currently held at the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone, and will be scanned and digitised in full colour by Kent County Council to ensure the highest possible image quality.
Findmypast will be responsible for indexing, hosting and publishing these vital records, the first of which will be published later in 2018 and will be accessible to genealogists through both search and browse experiences.
Digitisation is now underway and thousands of fully indexed images of original baptism, banns, marriage and burial registers spanning more than 400 years of Kent history will be made available online for the first time, exclusively at Findmypast. By improving access to these rich documents and making them searchable, Findmypast will provide family historians from around the world with even more opportunities to discover their Kent ancestors.
The project builds on an existing partnership between Findmypast and archives in Kent that has already led to the online publication of over 2.5 million Canterbury Archdeaconry records held by the Canterbury Cathedral Archives.
Once fully digitised and indexed, these new additions will join Findmypast’s Canterbury collection and existing collections of Kent Family History Society records to form the most comprehensive online repository of Kent parish registers in the word.
‘Findmypast already has one of the best collections of Kent records available online and we look forward to cementing this by making these images and the important details they contain readily accessible, in full colour, throughout the world, for the first time’ says Paul Nixon, Content Licensing Manager at Findmypast. ‘We are delighted that so much of Kent’s rich history and many of its people’s stories will be better known through this partnership.’
Mike Hill, KCC’s Cabinet Member for Community and Regulatory Services, said: “Kent’s libraries are often the starting point for residents who want to investigate their family history, and this link with Findmypast will provide a valuable addition to the information available.
“Staff in our Archives service have been hard at work scanning the county’s parish registers, which provide a fascinating insight into the lives of our ancestors.”
With thanks to FindmyPast