Handwritten church registers were transcribed and indexed so a UK genealogy publisher could release earlier family-history records online.
The challenge
The publisher needed records from baptism, marriage and burial registers that predated modern census coverage.
Aging paper, inconsistent handwriting and publication deadlines made manual internal scaling impractical.
The approach
SBL studied the register guidelines and trained a transcription team on archaic English parish scripts.
The process used query handling, review gates and structured indexing to prepare records for online release.
Study
Map parish register formats and transcription rules.
Index
Transcribe names, dates, events and locations into structured fields.
Publish
Validate and deliver web-ready ancestry datasets.
The result
Millions of parish records were converted into searchable data with the quality expected by family-history users.
- Older parish records became accessible beyond the physical archive.
- Baptism, marriage and burial details were structured for search.
- Quality routines supported a 99% accuracy target.
- The publisher gained a repeatable pipeline for fragile genealogy material.