We are pleased to announce another upgrade of the CCEd. New data has been made available, in particular for the diocese of Canterbury in the modern era since 1780, where the data is now nearly complete save for a few records relating to schoolmasters, and which also supplies dispensation information of great value to other diocesan records in enabling the reallocation of events to specific individuals, merging records which could not previously be linked to one individual with confidence.There is also new material for the most modern period in Gloucester.

Two aspects of this upgrade should be highlighted. First, a great deal of new material for the diocese of London in the most recent and central periods of the database has been made available.There remains a significant amount of material still to be definitively linked and processed, But for the most modern period, after 1760, we have now linked all of that relating to people with surnames beginning A-F to persons, along with the majority of that relating to clergy with surnames G-Z,  All of this material has been linked to location. and we have for the first time offered our interpretation of material relating to proprietary chapels in London, which are often hard to identify from the records, as well as such anomalies as #the floating chapel off the Tower [of London]’ on the Thames!

Secondly, and perhaps most important of all, for the first time we are, as promised, making available data relating to locations in the Church of England overseas: records of appointments to chaplaincies and other posts in the colonies, and in settlements in Europe and elsewhere are now not only being linked to persons, but to places (‘locations’). Linkage is stlll progressing for this material, and we will shortly post some more detailed information on how to interpret and access it. But the search engines will now permit you to search for clergy and events in ‘dioceses’ for Asia, Europe, America etc which are listed at the end of the diocesan lists. Most of the linkage so far relates to the last eighty years covered by the database, but we will soon be linking that relating to earlier periods. This is an extremely exciting development for the project, and we hope it will be of interest to many of our users, not least those themselves resident in the locations now available!

Enjoy!

Arthur Burns for the CCEd team