FLHIG

Family and Local History
Indexing Group

Selected articles from the Newsletter

This article first appeared in SIGGNL 11   (February 1996)

Vicar General and Faculty Office Calendar Indexes
by David Squire, Vicar General Indexing Project coordinator

Introduction

Parties to a marriage from different dioceses in the Province of Canterbury required a licence from either the Vicar General or the Faculty Office. Licences from the latter were required for parties from different provinces. The issue of such Licences was reasonably common and, although the annual numbers fluctuated quite widely, each office issued about 2,000 Licences per year in the period from 1700 to 1850. The vast majority were issued to common people, and it is this that makes them such an important source for tracing lost marriages. However the lack of an index makes them a largely untapped source.

The Licences themselves were of course issued to the parties concerned and, if  they have survived, will be scattered in private collections. However complete lists of Licences issued in date order ("calendars") survive from 1660 for the Vicar General, and from 1632 for the Faculty Office. Earlier calendars were thought to have been destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Also surviving are the application forms for the Licences ("allegations") which are signed by the parties concerned, in some cases by others (eg parents or guardians). The allegations provide the most important genealogical material, whereas the calendars only provide surnames (Vicar General), and forenames and surnames (Faculty Office).

Source materials

The original Vicar General and Faculty Office material is in the Lambeth Palace library, and microfilm copies of the Vicar General allegations (full series) and Faculty Office allegations (part only) are available in the library of the Society of Genealogists (SoG). A couple of years ago, the librarian of the Lambeth Palace library kindly donated photocopies of the Vicar General and Faculty Office calendars to the SoG, and it was decided to mount a SoG Computer Group project, to index those calendars for years where neither the calendars nor the allegations had already been indexed. Broadly this period covers from the early 1700's onwards. A cut-off date of 1850 was set. Work on computerising the Vicar General slip index from 1694 to 1709, and 1801 to 1803 was described by Colin Mills in SIGGNL10.

The reasons why it was decided to index the calendars rather than the allegations were:

1. the photocopies of the calendars could be distributed to volunteers working at home;

2. the calendars were found to be an accurate guide to the allegations so the calendar index would be a perfectly viable finding aid;

3. excluding the index of place names and people other than the marriage parties would not seriously detract from the utility of the index but would make the project very much more manageable.

Preparation

Colin Allen and I agreed to manage the project jointly. Colin Allen took on recruitment, briefing of volunteers together with liaison with volunteer inputters and checkers. He was also responsible for sorting out and keeping control of the photocopy calendars. I took on the technical aspects of the indexing including selection of suitable software and preparation of the final material for publication. I also undertook to send out an occasional newsletter.

From previous experience with similar projects, I decided that I wanted to supply volunteers with a customised computer program to ensure, as far as possible, a standard product from their labours. This would enable their work to be checked systematically and later collated, merged and published with the minimum of extra work and fuss. It was also felt that there could be valuable side benefits if the program was carefully designed - likely errors could be flagged early, the user could be prompted, and productivity could be enhanced by requiring the minimum of keystrokes.

Index design

The design of a name / date only index is, in principle, very straightforward, but there may be features of the program design which are of wider interest. Examples of these features include: (1) to keep control of a large number of files, there is a mechanism to create new files automatically based on a "questionnaire" filled in by volunteers - new Vicar General filenames are of the form VGyyyyXX where yyyy is the year being indexed, and XX are the volunteers initials; (2) the database header also includes information about the inputting volunteer, and the history of subsequent checks and corrections; (3) when adding, changing or deleting records, the user is prompted with a view of adjacent records, to minimise the risk of error; (4) the date field need only be visited when it changes and can be "spun" with cursor keys; (5) taking security backups has been made very simple; (6) requesting second opinions and leaving messages for checkers is made easier by providing function key macros.

I selected FoxPro 2.0 for DOS as the platform on which to build the various applications. DOS rather than Windows was chosen so as not to exclude volunteers who did not have particularly powerful computers. FoxPro is also extremely fast, versatile and well supported and programs can be built for distribution with no royalty payment or other costs involved. Volunteers do not need a copy of FoxPro themselves.

Whilst I was building version 1.0 of VicGen (as we called the input program), Colin Allen was recruiting volunteers and had sorted the photocopies into suitable batches. We tested VicGen and made some important improvements which were incorporated into version 1.1, which was the actual program distributed to volunteers in late October 1994 with the first batches of photocopies. A decision was made to begin indexing forward from 1751 because the handwriting for this period was much easier to read; later we would work back from 1750.

In practice

With over 100 years now input I think that it is fair to say that everything has worked as well as I could have expected in the first year. Users did ask for improvements to the program (eg different colour choices, better ways to review query notes etc), and accordingly version 1.2 was distributed in early 1995 incorporating these modifications. Several volunteers had not used a computer before, but they seemed to cope very well and, I believe, got some immediate satisfaction out of putting a new or borrowed computer to work on a group project.

However one of the problems of carrying out a project with volunteers working at home is that there is no natural way to keep in touch. For this reason we produce an occasional newsletter; two editions have come out so far - January and May 1995. Hopefully the next one late this autumn will be able to raise everyone's spirits by announcing the publication of the first tranche of 25 years of the index on microfiche.

Checking and publication

Although the error rate is small, it is noticeable, and Colin Allen and I decided that there should be a 100% check of submitted computer files back to the calendar photocopies. A separate check is made to ensure that agreed and promulgated indexing conventions have all been followed consistently. On top of this, second opinions are needed in difficult cases of interpretation. For this reason all checking is carried out on-site at the SoG library, where the checkers have ready access to the allegation microfilms to help resolve difficulties. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, checking has become something of a bottleneck.

Publication is planned to be on microfiche covering 25 year periods. The exact style of the final presentation has been the subject of some debate but this is now settled and a special merger program has been written to convert the checked and corrected input files direct to camera ready copy without the need to go into a word processor to ensure that headers, footers, indents, columns and full text dual dates are all correctly presented.

The future

Hopefully the remaining 30 years or so of the Vicar General calendars will be completed this winter, despite the fact that they are more difficult to read than the ones already dealt with. We will then look to the Faculty Office calendars. These will take longer to index because forenames are also included, but the "Faculty" program which I am currently devising has a number of shortcuts for forenames which are possible because of their predictability. I have scored forenames by their frequency of occurrence in a sample of 18th century Faculty Office calendars and, once the first letter of a name is input, suggested names in frequency order are presented. In over 95% of cases the required name can be picked with only three keystrokes.

Like many part time genealogical indexers, I am not a touch typist. Productivity gains through smarter indexing software is therefore a particular interest of mine. I do have some ideas for doubling or even tripling entry speeds for the average untrained typist, and I plan some research on this area this winter. If successful, perhaps that will be the subject of my next article.

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