PARISH REGISTERS
Prior to the establishment of civil registration we rely on church records for information, in the form of baptismal registers, marriage records and burial registers. The starting point here for English and Welsh research is familysearch.org, which has many substantial collections of parish registers digitised and freely available, as well as diocesan copies of registers called Bishops’ Transcripts. In addition there are many searchable databases on FamilySearch without corresponding images, such as the International Genealogical Index and the ‘England and Wales Non-Conformist Record Indexes (RG4-8), 1588–1977’ collection. Many volunteer efforts also exist, such as FreeReg ( freereg.org.uk), and various Online Parish Clerks projects covering different counties, such as the excellent opc-cornwall.org. For Scotland, information including names, dates and parishes within Church of Scotland birth and marriage registers are included within the International Genealogical Index on FamilySearch, as well as some nonconformist events (the parish denomination will be noted in the return). Searches on ScotlandsPeople’s old parish registers, nonconformist churches and Roman Catholic churches collections also return some free information ( scotlandspeople.gov.uk).
For Irish Catholic ancestry, the National Library of Ireland has digitised all surviving Roman Catholic registers prior to 1880 and made them available at registers.nli.ie. Although this is a browse-only resource, both Ancestry and Findmypast have created free-to-access indexes to the collection, requiring no subscription. Some additional church registers from parts of the country are also available on Irish Genealogy at churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/ churchrecords, and for some Church of Ireland parishes through the Anglican Record Project at ireland.anglican.org/about/rcb-library.