“It was very obvious right from the beginning that these thousands of records were seeing a lot of use and being handled every single day. We were seeing broken bindings, fading ink, pages that were dried and flaking apart,” said Lester, a layperson with degrees in both history and archive management. “So I realized something had to be done soon.”
Three years ago, the archdiocese became the country’s first to undertake a major effort to make its archive, listing 200 years of baptisms, confirmations, communions, marriages, holy orders and the anointing of the sick - a goldmine for professional and amateur historians and genealogists - accessible online.
