Genealogy Chat

This is an excellent site in terms of what's there - but it's (shall we say) 'tricky' to use! I'll paste a reply in below with some ideas of how to get it to cough up the goods. Christine

If you are lucky enough to have ancestors who were married in Rochester (Kent) Deanery, you might find the image of their original Parish Register entry (with original signatures) on http://cityark.medway.gov.uk/ It's not terribly user-friendly in the way it's laid out, but you'd need to follow the 'CityArk Imagebase' link in the left-hand menu bar. Then you wade through the acres of prose to 'Link 2 Medway Ancestors: images of the Rochester Archdeaconry area parish registers (in progress) click here' Then you scroll down the page to where there's lots of stuff in bold and see if you can find a likely church whose registers have been 'done'. They aren't listed in a tabular way - just in a long paragraph! You then get a long list of numbered images - without any description of what's in them (dates would have been useful!). The first few are usually the header-pages - after that you just have to jump about, noting which ones you've looked at (you can't rely on the links changing colour, unfortunately), to narrow down to the one you want. If you are noting the image numbers, it might be worth noting the dates they cover at the same time – in case you ever need to go back! If you use Excel, you can copy & paste the list of images and they appear in a column of cells. Then you can add the info against the ones you've looked at. Unless you have very good grounds for guessing whereabouts the target date will be in the list, the scientific way to look for a particular date is 1] to go for the middle: you’ve hit your target? Or the target date is earlier or later. 2] If you didn’t get a hit, go for half way between the 1st attempt and the end which is earlier or later, according to what you need: Now you’ve hit your target? Or the target date is earlier or later. 3] Repeat the process, within the half-size bounds of your new attempt and the previous attempt(s) or the start/finish. Watch out! - both sides of the book - even and odd pages - are on the same image, so don't forget to scroll across or you'll miss half the entries. Please let us know if you have any other inspirations to add to this.