A long time project on this site has been the Madras Priests and Churches Database. This is primarily extracted from the chapter Chaplains in the HEIC 1805 to 1835 in Rev Frank Penny’s The Church In Madras, published in 1904, plus additional information from other sources. The information is publicly available on the internet and as published books. These are great resources, but it is difficult to use sometimes and does contain errors, some but not all have been corrected in the database!
There are several uses for the database, my original motivation was that on many birth, marriage and death entries the general region was recorded, but the specific church was not, having the priests name and date can help narrow down both the church and hence the religion or denomination. If you have the church but can’t read the priests name, the database is also helpful in getting to the right person.
The database can be found at: https://spuddybike.org.uk/research/madras-churches-and-priests/ or by navigating to it under Research as below.
The database contains all the available information I am able to obtain. Searching is straight-forward. This is result of a search for St Mark’s Church in Blacktown Madras, and I have sorted it into residency order, the number of rows will appear at the bottom.
If you click on the “eye” icon on the left hand side, it brings up the whole record, which contains additional information not on the view above, including the source for the record and a biography of the priest which will be interest if you are researching priests.
If you find any errors, please let me know by commenting on this post, by by email see: https://spuddybike.org.uk/about/
Happy hunting
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