During the months of July and August two important developments took place in the Parish Archive.
The first was the acquisition of two fireproof cabinets in which the Baptism, Marriage and Death Registers, together with music scores, will be archived. This acquisition was made possible thanks to financial assistance by the Ministry for Gozo and Planning through funds for voluntary organisations.
The second development was that these same registers are now accessible online (in order to conform with data protection legislation we uploaded the registers up to 1930). This development was possible due to the cooperation of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) of St John University in the State of Minnesota, United States of America, run by the Benedictine Order.
This library was founded in 1964 with the aim of preserving manuscripts from around the world in a digital form (originally this preservation was done by means of microfilming). The library has a section dedicated specifically to Malta, the Malta Study Centre, which was founded in 1973, that is to say only nine years after the foundation of the library itself. The curator of the Centre presently is by Dr Daniel K. Gullo, who has been in this capacity since 2014. The Centre has more than 16,000 reels of microfilm and 2.50 million digital images related to the history of Malta and the Order of St John from more than 70 institutions in Malta, the United States, Italy, Great Britain, and Canada.
It is now therefore possible to conduct resarch without the necessity of consulting the registers themselves. By means of these two significant developments, the historical heritage of the Parish and of Gozo is being preserved.