Thursday 14 January 2021

RC ancestors who emigrated to Massachusetts? New tool launched to identify their parishes

Regular readers of Irish Genealogy News will already be aware of the on-going digitisation of the Archdiocese of Boston's parish registers (1789-1920) by AmericanAncestors.org. To accompany that dataset, the Archdiocese's Archive Department has created a new tool – The Boston Catholic Parish Map – to help researchers determine which parish their ancestors attended.

The new map depicts the Archdiocese of Boston in around 1955 when a concerted effort was made to document the boundaries of each parish, and reflects the height of the Archdiocese in terms of number of parishes.

Click to view the RC Archdioces of Boston map

The boundary of territorial parishes are shaded in various colours, and the location of their parish churches identified in the same colour. (National or other non-geographic churches are plotted in black.)

Searches via the box in the top right of the map will identify and plot an address.

It will also show nearby neighboring parishes which may have encompassed the address depending on the time period.

Clicking within a parish boundary will provide the name of the parish and address of the parish church. 

Clicking on a church marker will provide the name of the church, address, date the parish was created and, where applicable, the date the parish was suppressed or merged.

You can access the map at the following locations: 

For guidance on how to use the map, consult the how-to video below or on YouTube.

Additional content, including images of the church, the churchlocation of parish records and links to the online records, will be added to the map in the future.

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