Cornish Parish Register Online Project

Grandson outgrows bucket!

The Cornish Parish Register Online Project (C-PROP) is a daughter project of the Cornish Online Parish Clerk (OPC) scheme. The project aims to transcribe all the Cornish parish register entries and place them online, free-to-view, in a searchable database. The project encompasses other sorts of data such as the West Briton lists of “hatches, matches and dispatches”.

The people involved are Myra Cordrey (OPC scheme co-ordinator), Diane Donohue & Julia Mosman (LDS liaison), Bill O’Reilly (COCP “fixer” & C-PROP uploader), and myself, recruiter for C-PROP. I am also the Free Census organiser for Cornwall and the other four are all OPC for various Cornish parishes.

A current project is to re-type the contents of the well-known Phillimore marriage lists. Done at the end of the 19th century, these are a valuable transcript of the parish registers. Often the work was carried out by vicars with the co-operation of the parish priest. These people were experienced with the records and of course, the records were younger than they are now.

Although this data is a typed transcript, we need it re-typed into our standard spreadsheet as a vital intermediate step to uploading into the database. We would like to capture all the information in the lists. You are invited to place the additional information in the two notes columns that are provided.

You will see that there are a lot of columns you won’t need. This is because the spreadsheet was designed to cover all types of registration document and the later registers carried a lot more information.

Each parish should have its own spreadsheet and on completion, each parish should be emailed to me. Do not wait till you have completed the volume. I will eye-ball it and then forward it to one of the two uploaders. They will check it more thoroughly for layout and other problems and upload it to C-PROP.

When you have graduated from the Phillimore project we hope that you are sufficiently enthused to volunteer to take on some actual parish registers. These are supplied on disc and involve transcription as well as data input.

C-PROP can be seen on http://www.cornwall-opc-database.org/ Check out the coverage table to see your name in lights! Currently, we have well over half a million records online. With your help we should hit a million soon. Well – quite soon.