SGC DIGITAL ARCHIVES — CHURCH BURIAL & DEATH RECORDS
New Haven & West Haven, Connecticut | 2026-09-08 | SGC-CH-004

Extract this ZIP and open START_HERE.html in a browser. Name, source, city and
keyword searching works locally without an account or a server. Repository
links need internet access. Search Historical pages for names not present in
the separately transcribed Church rows.

INCLUDED
633 church rows: 605 from the supplied Catholic Christ's Church / St. John's
table (already included in the Saint Bernard collection), 27 newly transcribed
Center Church deaths for 1869–1870, and an Eliza Allen correction. Rows are not
a count of unique people or verified cemetery interments.
1,441 searchable pages: complete available OCR text of nine historical volumes
plus one supplemental 1911 West Haven Cemetery grave-reference page.
25 source entries, including 14 church-register catalog leads.
The unchanged six-page Christ Church PDF; selected historical page scans;
full OCR text files; JSON data; SQLite database; source and acquisition notes.

SCOPE AND GAPS
This is an open-source research edition, not all surviving church records.
No West Haven manuscript register scan was acquired. FamilySearch catalog
101904 identifies First Congregational v.8 deaths1774–1843, v.10 funerals
1863–1916 and v.11 deaths1881; film6269 / DGS8615152, originals at Connecticut
State Library. Request the pages and confirm copying/reuse access. Other
catalog dates are collection-level leads, not verified burial subseries.
Episcopal Christ Church, Trinity, other Catholic and Protestant parish
registers, later volumes and undigitized records still require investigation.

EVIDENCE
The early Catholic Christ's Church is distinct from Episcopal Christ Church
in either city. White-Haven / Fair-Haven in the United Church title is not
West Haven. North and United Church catalogues overlap. Keep editions separate.
Death-list membership, dismissal, admission, stone location and grave location
are different facts. No new death certificates, burial permits or plot maps
were obtained. Preserve ambiguous raw dates and names; do not infer centuries.
OCR is uncorrected and can corrupt names, numbers, bold type and table columns.
PDF page is the reliable file-order locator. A repository_page_label is only
unverified scan metadata and may disagree with the printed folio. Typographic
crypt markers in Dexter's inscriptions require the image. Read the1882 volume
alongside the1914 corrections, retaining the original numbers.

REUSE AND CITATION
Historical U.S. publications before1931 are treated as public domain based on
their publication dates. Retain the original author and digitizing institution.
Aronsen et al.2019, PLOS ONE14(9),e0219279, S1Table: CC BY4.0.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219279
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The S1PDF is unchanged; JSON is a structured transcription with source fields.
Modern catalog links do not confer reproduction rights for hosted scan images.
Cite SGC collectionSGC-CH-004, record/pageID, source title, exact PDF/printed
page, repository URL and access date. Full per-source notes are in sources.json.

SQLITE SEARCH
The database includes records, pages, sources and search_fts(FTS5).
Example: SELECT id,kind,title FROM search_fts WHERE search_fts MATCH 'Sanford';
For exact structured fields, query records; dates remain strings intentionally.

INTEGRITY
checksums.sha256 lists package files. The supplied PDF SHA256 is
03ab2015762f2d469e05efaa03f3fec30768b68e5775d3c302131a8b35a88333.
