Family Historian User Group

Hi, Firstly I would like to say thank you so much for Ancestral Sources it is a fantastic tool for powerhouse entering of data. As with all fantastic resources you get that if only feeling sometimes...

Currently when I add the clergy field to the marriage (or baptism/burial) entry the data is saved within the source for the event with the rest of the details and unless I have missed something I need to go into the source field to see this information.

It would be really great if when you add the church you could have a selection box showing the clergy currently associated with this church or add a new entry if they are not there. The thinking behind this being that some registry entries are much clearer than others and you have to guess what the name says when you may have already seen a much clearer version of their name.

Secondly it would be really useful to see the bigger picture of who in the family was hatched, matched or dispatched by a priest (or occasionally maybe even two of these events).

I have currently set up a source citation for the main churches that feature within my tree and try to remember to add this citation each time I add an event that happened at the church ie St. Willow Parish Church Type: Location Citations: 226. If the priest entry data was able to be exported and linked to the church record it would be fantastic. Maybe there is a way of doing this that I haven't worked out yet.

Sorry if this is a bit like war and peace, in a nutshell it would be really useful to be able to pull together a church, the priests that have been there and the events each of them was involved with allowing you to see the human stories behind this, for instance an husband and wife had actually both been christened by the same priest in their infancy.

Thanks for reading and I hope this makes sense.

Having a Source record for each Church of interest is probably the best avenue, but I doubt if details such as the Clergy could be added automatically.

You would need to add labelled Notes to record the Names of the Clergy, and any other details.

Then a custom Query based on the All Facts standard Query should be able to list all Facts involving the same Church Address and the same Clergy Name. If a Query cannot do it, then a Plugin could.

At the moment, I am using Associated Persons to link the appropriate clergy to the parishioners. But I wonder if a Named List of Clergy People in Family Historian might help you pop up a list of candidates, even if you have to switch away from AS for a moment to use it?

I cross-check the clergy in my FH file with the Clergy of the Church of England Database at http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/, and other references like the Clergy lists on Find My Past. That allows me to add the date range a vicar was at 'my' parish and other information.

Another unexpected source of information was the British Newspaper Archive, where I discovered that the vicar of one of 'my' parishes was in hot water with his local bishop for not performing baptisms and other duties! It explained some of the parish register entries that had me puzzled as to why someone else's name had appeared on some of the entries.