The records show the interaction of families, how disease spread in the tightly populated missions and the creation of new communities outside the missions, he said. "You can see that in the records, so what you are seeing is the basic population record of California."

Ritchie said the project began in 1998 when a group of historians approached him with the idea of creating a searchable database to better organize and use the scattered records of the mission residents. After obtaining initial funding through grants, the work began with a small team of data specialists who could read Spanish and who had received further training in deciphering the Old World Spanish scripts containing the records, he said.

One challenge for the data specialists was that since paper was difficult for the Franciscans to obtain, they used many abbreviations in the records to cut their paper usage, forcing the researchers to figure out what the abbreviations meant as they entered the data.

What began as an estimated US$125,000, one-year task became an eight-year, $650,000 project, Ritchie said.

The project began with information stored in Microsoft Access databases because that was the format already used by many historians. Later on, the database was converted for use with a Microsoft SQL Server database because it has broader capabilities and capacities for data, Ritchie said.