Parish Registers

The Parish Registers or Parochial Registers

Parish Registers, sometimes referred to as Parochial Registers, are the most used source of genealogical data when researching your forebears before 1837, the date when civil registration was required.

You will find Parish Records dating back to the time just after the establishment of the Church of England in 1538 though in some places didn’t start keeping records before 1598.  You may find a few gaps in early records. These are significantly between 1553 and 1558 when the Catholic Mary Tudor was on the throne, and between 1641 and 1660 during the period of the English Civil War.

Viewing Parish Records

You can view these historic records, or at least copies of them,  in places such as the county records offices where they are usually available to be viewed on microfiche.

Studying these records has been made much easier by groups who are transcribing them and making them available on the Internet in a searchable format.  A county-by-county list of resources can be found on the ParishRegister website.  Another source of freely available  BMD records is the network of Online Parish Clerks (OPC). The gargantuan task of transcribing this data is undertaken by dedicated teams of volunteers, all with a keen interest in genealogy.

The main family tree research websites such as Ancestry and Find My Past will also have this data integrated into its search facility.

The information recorded in Parish Records includes the following: