Sandhurst archivist Dr Donna Bailey is on a mission to preserve parish sacramental registers and make work easier for Parish staff by digitising over 120,000 individual sacramental records as part of the Parish Sacramental Registers Digitisation Project. 

“I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.”

― Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

Watching Sandhurst Archivist, Dr Donna Bailey carefully turn the pages of the Tallangatta Baptism Register with her white cotton gloves evokes the sentiment of author Geraldine Brooks.  It’s hard not to start imagining the baptism of Francis Hugh McArdle in the summer of 1916 in idyllic Tallangatta, while the world is at war.  A joy-filled occasion, a day of hopes and dreams, a doting mother, a proud father, and a priest, James Lawless, wearing a thick cassock obviously too hot for the season …   

Francis Hugh McArdle is the first name recorded in the first line of the Tallangatta Baptisms register. Written in elegant cursive, no doubt with a fountain pen, and maybe with even more care than Dr Donna Bailey’s turning of pages!  There it is, recorded for posterity, the baptism of Baby McArdle and hundreds of others over many years.  The stories are endless.   

Until 2016, if you had asked a question about a sacramental record at St Kilian’s, Beechworth or Heathcote, for example, the Parish Priest, Staff or Volunteers would have gone to a large and rather heavy leather-bound register, (most likely made and imported from Dublin or London) and physically leafed through the decaying, yellowing pages. If you were lucky, you might have been with them — a whiff of dust, a stale smell of brittle paper … but alas, no more.  This is becoming a scene of the past. It’s sad, but true, Sandhurst sacramental registers are being digitised on a grand scale and it is all for the better.

Dr Donna Bailey says the whole point of digitising the registers is to preserve these beautiful books. “The ink is fading, the pages are crumbling, the binding is wearing, some of them are literally falling apart,” she says. “These are the only records of our Parish Sacraments, and we want to make sure we keep them in perpetuity.” 

“By digitising these records, we not only increase the efficiency with which sacramental records can be identified, we also save the wear and tear on these originals and, therefore, protect the information for the future,” explains Donna. 

After the Parish sacramental registers have been digitised, each parish receives all records on a portable hard drive and parishes are strongly encouraged to use this resource when searching for records. “It will be much easier for parish staff, and kinder to the original material, to search for records on the digitised files,” says Donna.  To preserve the original registers, parishes are provided with archival housing to store the register books so they can be permanently preserved.   “The registers are wrapped in archival bags, then placed into permanent archival boxes and sealed up, preventing further contamination of the paper which can occur.  “So, no bugs can get in, and no greasy hands can turn the pages!” laughs Donna knowing many a true word is spoken in jest. 

Donna has been working on a complete audit of parish sacramental registers, prioritising which registers need to be salvaged first and establishing which parish sacramental registers have been lost or destroyed by fire over time. 

No matter how many registers she has seen, Donna still gets very excited when new registers are delivered to her office for digitisation. Earlier this week, Nagambie Parishioners, Mel Arnold and Rhonda Robinson delivered two registers, one baptism register, and one marriage register; the baptism register interestingly starts before the erection of the parish in 1875 and includes entries from the 1860s.  The marriage register begins with the erection of their parish in 1875.  They also brought talk of a well-known Nun, Sr Leonie De Sept Douleurs, of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who witnessed a miracle at Lourdes and who was baptised in Nagambie on the day of the opening of the church. However, her baptismal record, so far, has not been found in the fragile register.  Nothing like a baptism-mystery to keep detective Dr Donna Bailey enthralled in her work.  Donna and her Nagambie Team (Rhonda and Mel) aim to solve this mystery in time for the Nagambie Anniversary celebrations in November this year. 

The Sandhurst digitisation project started in 2016 when selected Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation and Death/burial registers from Beechworth, Benalla, St Kilian's, Dookie, Eaglehawk, Echuca, Heathcote, Numurkah and Shepparton. A total of 43 books were digitised. 

This year, selected registers from Sacred Heart Cathedral, Nagambie, Euroa, Elmore, Marong, Inglewood, Cohuna, and Tallangatta, totalling 31 books, will be digitised. Further digitisation is planned for other parishes in 2023 - 2024.

Crunching the numbers

After this phase of the Digitisation Project has been completed, 74 sacramental register books with over 120,000 individual sacramental records will have been digitised. Each individual record offers particulars that tell the story of around one hundred and seventy years of the Diocese of Sandhurst. 

Out of interest

The Catholic Church is one of the richest repositories of genealogical data in the world. Catholic Sacraments, not only record names, dates and places, linking people to a specific time and place, they also link people to other people, recording the names of godparents or sponsors, for example. Furthermore, Catholic sacraments such as baptism and confirmation provide information which is obviously not recorded by government organisations. In some places in Victoria, the Church was keeping records before government organisations.  This is not so unusual; in many parts of Europe, for example, Catholic registers reach back as far as the 1500s. 

Donna says she receives requests from both family history researchers and parishioners who are preparing for important parish anniversaries, seeking marriage, baptism and confirmation and burial information, but notes that only records over 100 years old (for baptisms) may be released to the public in keeping with Australian Privacy Law and Diocesan policy. 

Diocesan Archivist, Dr Donna Bailey, looks over the Nagambie Baptism Register with Nagambie parishioners Rhonda Robinson and Mel Arnold. The register has records dating back to the 1860s. 

The first page of the Tallangatta Baptism register with records dated from 1916.