Yesterday's Names - helping you discover more about the lives of your ancestors.
Parish magazines were published, usually monthly, from the late 19th century, as a means of informing parishioners about Church services and other Church related events in the parish.
They vary greatly in content between different parishes, some containing very little information of interest to family history researchers, others containing vast amounts of useful data that can provide vital clues. Most parish magazines list baptisms, marriages, and burials, with varying degrees of detail, but they often also give details of other events, such as prizes awarded at Sunday schools, names of players in local cricket matches, winners at flower shows, etc. They also frequently list the names of people who made donations to various Church funds. Although parish magazines tend to concentrate on the deeds of the clergy, church workers, and parish gentry, whose lives were very closely interwoven with the Church, they do also sometimes contain fascinating snippets of information about ordinary parishioners.
At Yesterday's Names, we produce CDs from parish magazines, for use by family history researchers. These are intended to help identify potential further avenues of research, or to add snippets of background information about individuals.
The documents on our CDs are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, and a copy of Adobe Reader is included on each CD. We produce two different types of CD based on parish magazines:-
Index CDs : Some of our CDs contain lists of names found in the magazines, together with a brief description of each reference. These CDs usually also contain a selection of articles transcribed from the magazines. They are NOT a full transcription of the magazines, and do NOT contain scanned images of the magazine pages. The data for each parish varies depending on the content of the magazine, and usually contains a combination of the some or all of the following : Baptisms, Marriages, Burials, Prizes, Donations, Advertisements, and Miscellaneous references. The data is fully searchable using Adobe Reader. See the separate page in our shop describing the content of these types of CDs in more detail.
Image CDs : The other type of CDs that we produce contain scanned images of the magazine pages, together with a simple name/page index. The name index section on these CDs is fully searchable using Adobe Acrobat Reader, but the scanned page images are not. See the separate page in our shop describing the content of these types of CDs in more detail.
In some cases we produce CDs from other church-produced booklets such as church manuals. Please see the descriptions of these specific items in our product list for a description of the types of data they contain.
Why do some Yesterday's Names CDs contain scanned images, but others don't?
The decision about whether to scan or just index really depends on the quality of the magazines for the parish. These documents are over a hundred years old, and were often printed on coloured paper. The quality of the paper is also very variable, often now very fragile, and in some cases the magazines have been bound so tightly, it would be impossible to scan them without removing them from their binding. The worst thing though is trying to get a decent quality scan, with faded print on coloured paper (the colour often differing on each page!).
So - if the pages are of a fairly uniform background colour, the print is reasonably distinct, and the paper will stand up to it - then we scan the pages and accompany them with a simple name index. But if the pages aren't easily scannable, then we produce a detailed name index, extracting as much of the information about each name reference as possible, and adding in transcriptions of a selection of articles.
Content of Index CDs Content of Image CDs
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