Question re: civil transcripts of church records

[rwf]

I'm grateful that the civil transcripts of church records are available through LDS, and curious about how the original registers came into being, and who was responsible for their creation.

Were the transcripts in Bukovina and Galicia created by the parish priest, or were they created by a government official/civil servant? Or did this vary, depending upon the location/village/religious affiliation, etc.? In effect, was the priest "conscripted" or "deputized" to perform this duty, duplicating what was already being recorded by the church?

Thanks!

Richard

[Ponich]

Here are various statements extracted from John Pihach's book "Ukrainian Geneology".

"In 1642, the Orthodox metroplolitan of Kyiv, Petro Mohyla, instructed his priests to start keeping parish registers. The Council of Trent of 1563 ... is credited with being the source of record keeping in the Roman Catholic world. .... At the Synod of Zamosc ... of 1720, the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church made decisions that would eventually make its record keeping a consistent, regulated activity. ... But proper implementation of the prescribed procedures took a long time to establish. ....

Most Ukrainians with roots in western Ukraine will be able to find parish registers going back to 1784, shortly after the incorporation of Galicia and Bukovyna into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Hapsburg authorities had the Roman and Greek Catholic clergy keep vital records for them instead of establishing a separate bureaucracy for that purpose. ....

Parish priests were instructed to produce copies annually of all the birth, marriage, and death records in their parish and to deposit these copies at the bishop's office, where they were available to the civil authorities. These bishop's transcripts and the parish's original registers constituted two sets of identical records. Researchers should therefore keep in mind that if one set has been lost, there should still be a second one. "

And much more detail is provided in the book.

[rwf]

Thank you, Ponich. Pihach's book is now at the top of my list.

Richard