Introduction to Parish Registers

Parish Registers are...

...records of baptisms, marriages, and burials made by the Church. They are a valuable resource for researching your family tree because the census and official records of birth, marriage and death do not go back further than 1837. Parish records can extend your research back to the time of King Henry VIII. Most records go back to the 1600s, and some even go back to the 1500s.

Phillimore's Marriage Records is a series of books published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and holds transcriptions of marriage registers. Learn more about Phillimore's marriage registers below.

In general births were not recorded but children were generally baptised within 2-3 months of their birth. These baptism records will usually give the name of the child's parents and their 'abode'. Use this information to find the marriage record of the parents. The marriage record will usually tell you the name of both parties and their parents names. use that to find the baptism records of the parents and so on. Incidentally after 1837 you will find that marriage records in a parish are the same as the records held by the Registrar and not nearly as expensive to look at. More information can be found below.

Tracing an Ancestor

These records can help you trace your family roots back through baptisms, marriages, and burials.

To trace an ancestor, you will need to know where they lived and the church they went to - Parishes correspond quite closely to villages of the same name. Whereas a rural parish may include a small village and two or three hamlets, there will be many parishes in the city, so you would need to determine in which your family lived.