Parish Register Database
Over the years in our hunt for those elusive ancestors, our members have looked at thousands of parish register entries for Kays, some on-line, some from published extracts and some even in the original documents. In many cases, we have recorded all of those entries and not just the ones that were relevant to us.
The result of this is that we have a record of many tens of thousands of recorded entries for Kay births, marriages and deaths. The aim of this project is to pull them together and make them available to members of the Association to help with their researches.
At present we are being fairly selective about the surnames we include. Obviously, variants of the spelling of the name Kay will be included (we’ve got 35 of them so far). However, we are excluding two major variants that are offered by Family Search – Okey and MacKay, and their variants. MacKay might be an issue; there are entries in Cumberland where it seems there may have been an overlap between the two names. We’re concentrating on England for now, but when we move north of the Border, it definitely will become an issue in the Lowland areas where both forms of the name were common.
This has been a major undertaking:
- All our data was in electronic format, but not necessarily the same format. It needed to be pulled together and reconciled – inevitably there were duplicates.
- We must catch all variants on first names. ‘Elizabeth’, ‘Liz’ and ‘Betty’ are all the same so should be shown as such. Does ‘Jo:’ mean ‘John’, ‘Jonathan’ or ‘Joseph’?
- Clearly, members will want to search on particular locations. We are relying on local knowledge here, to offer a choice of locations where we do have data and then letting the researcher do the rest.
- Equally, a researcher will have some sort of year in mind. What we have at present is a very wide net, including all entries for people who might have been alive then.
The first cut is a prototype. As members start to use it in earnest, then we can see what we really want. But it is a start.The results are available to members of the Association. To view them, please login by clicking on the link below. If you do not yet have a login ID for this site, please contact info@kayfamilyassociationuk.com.