There have been 3 phases in the preservation of the Parish Registers held by the Catholic Church; the 1st in 1976, the 2nd in 2004 and the 3rd started in 2017 and ended in 2021.
In the first phase in the 1970s, the original Parish Registers were gathered together, baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial, for parishes that were founded before 1855. This is the date in which Statutory (civil) register became the official form of recording births, marriages and deaths. This replaced the system overseen by the Church of Scotland (the Established Church) and other religious organisations. These early registers where sent to the National Archives of Scotland (the then Scottish Record Office), where the originals where copied. The originals and a bound photocopy were then sent back to each Parish and/or Diocese.
The second phase was carried out in 2004, the Bishops decided, for preservation reasons, to call in all the historic registers into the Scottish Catholic Archive to facilitate the preservation and digitisation of them. These were retained in the Archive and a copy was issued for retention in the parishes. The digital images created were indexed and made available to the public via the government’s web site “Scotland’s People”, where they generate a small return used to cover the cost of the digitisation and indexing that took place. This has been a very successful operation and has ensured the future of these very valuable registers.
As with the first phase of the project, these coved all Scottish parishes in existence before 1855; the records of Glasgow's Catholic cemetery; and the records of the RC Bishopric of the Forces, which records all sacramental events for British service men and women serving in the armed forces worldwide.
We now find ourselves at the third stage in the Parish Register Project, with the signing of the contract with Find my Past. This phase also necessitates the calling into the Archive of the Parish Registers from the parishes founded before, and including 1950, and will ensure their preservation well into the future. The original register were accessioned in to the archive for long term preservation and copies were sent out to the parishes.