The parish register

Baptisms, marriages, deaths and the 1864 church membership roll of the Beaver Island Catholic parish, as Helen Collar (1911–1995) transcribed them from the registers. Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University publishes her transcriptions; this page indexes what they record and links to each entry there.

These are records, not articles. Nothing here is a claim this archive makes. A row says a register records something on a date; it does not identify the person with anyone in the encyclopedia, and Collar's own notes are full of the reasons why not — in this parish the same three or four given names recur across unrelated families, which is exactly why by-names like “Black John”, “Big Biddie” and “Paddy Rua” existed. Where the line between a record and a claim is drawn, and why a transcriber's conjecture never crosses it, is set out in the editorial standards.

859 baptism · 407 death · 201 marriage · 76 church roll · 73 birth.

Most of this register is nineteenth-century: it is the founding generation of the parish, and it is the stretch of the island's past where the timeline of researched events is thinnest.