Parish Records

Before the introduction of Civil Registration in 1837, the only records to the key events in people's lives were recorded in the registers of parish churches and some non-conformist places of worship. These are the records of Baptism, Marriage and Burial.

The earliest parish registers usually date to around the mid 16th Century, when Elizabeth I declared that accurate registers should be maintained. However most only date from around 1600, after she had instructed that they should be preserved in bound books and not on any old scrap of writing material. Even after her efforts, many registers have been lost over the years and those surviving today are now usually safely deposited in the local record office, not the church they are associated with.

Parish registers can contain large gaps, such as for the Commonwealth period, which can leave the mid 1600s looking sparse. You also get volumes which have gone missing over the years leaving frustratingly large gaps. Small gaps aren't as bad unless they happen to coincide with the event you are looking for. These are usually due to negligence, often occurring where the clerk didn't enter them at the time and forgot to do it later. If you are lucky, some of the larger gaps in Parish Records caused by lost volumes may be covered by the Bishop's or Archdeacon's Transcripts. These are copies of the events copied from the Parish registers which were sent to the Diocese each year. BT's may themselves be incomplete, especially at the beginning or end of the periods.

Unlike the Census or the Civil registration material, Parish Records are scattered across the country, so it will be well in the future, if ever, that we will be able to search them online in the same way. Most churches have deposited records over 100 years old at their local record office, but some still retain burial registers for example, that were started in the last century and still aren't full yet. Chapel records are not as well preserved, some are in private hands and many have been lost. However there are many parish register transcripts published by various parish record societies, historical groups and individuals and these lend themselves to being made accessible online.

Using the parish registers

Most people are tracing a surname line, but the tradition of marrying in the bride's parish can make marriages before 1837 difficult to trace. When a man marries out of the parish there are often no clues as to where he went, requiring extensive searching of an ever widening circle of surrounding parishes in the hope of finding him.

You may strike lucky if they were married by banns and the Banns register still exists, though not many do. Early genealogists, for whom record access was more difficult than today, recognised the difficulties of tracing marriages and this led to several of them creating manuscript indexes. The best known are Boyd's and Pallot's, however Phillimore set about it in a different way, transcribing and publishing marriages from many churches. The parish records currently available on TheGenealogist are taken from various published transcripts, and include many from the Phillimore series of transcripts of marriage registers.

Parish registers online

TheGenealogist has now put online thousands of parishes. These have two main formats, database and searchable book images.

The database records consist of easily searched transcripts of the original records which allow you to search them on various fields and may also have linked images of the original registers. This feature depends on the local archive giving permission to publish the images.

The searchable books consist of indexed books that have were transcribed and published many years ago, many over 110 years old. These transcript books have then been OCR'd (Optical Charachter Recognition) to turn the pages into searchable text.

Parish registers on CD

S&N has published over 450 parish records CDs

The Phillimore transcripts of parish records go back as far as 1538 for some. W.P. Phillimore was a genealogist who started the job of publishing transcripts of early parish records in the 1890. These normally end in 1812 or 1837 for the range of years covered you will need to look at the details for the county you're researching. Most of the Phillimore transcripts are of marriages and have been published on CD by S&N.

Other transcripts are published by societies or individuals. We have published these parish records when permitted to do so or when the records are out of copyright. We are always looking to increase the range of these publications.

Dwelly's transcribed Bishop's Transcripts for parishes whose records, covering the Somerset area, no longer exist. These are now published by S&N on CD.

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