Find Your Family
WDYTYA? genealogist Laura Berry reveals the pros and cons of using online Anglican parish registers
WDYTYA? genealogist Laura Berry reveals the pros and cons of using online Anglican parish registers
When the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show first hit our screens, the idea of parish registers going online was pie in the sky. Back then genealogists spent hours scouring microfilmed copies of baptism, marriage and burial registers deposited at county record offices in the hope of tracing a family tree back beyond the start of civil registration in 1837.
With roughly 15,000 Church of England parishes to choose from in the mid-1830s, the search was almost always restricted to places where you knew an ancestor had lived. So the chances of taking your research back to the earliest registers created during Tudor times were slim, especially if your ancestors moved around. The best shortcuts before the age of the web were limited collections of typewritten name indexes compiled by volunteers and publishers for specific parishes.
Fifteen years on and an unprecedented number of these indexes and scanned registers can be searched on such sites as ancestry.co.uk, familysearch.org, findmypast. co.uk and thegenealogist.co.uk. A world of possibilities has opened up, enabling us to find connections for people in places that we may never have thought to look. However, these online databases are by no means complete. Websites are great for giving ‘hints’ and suggesting digitised records that might have belonged to your ancestor, but there may be a more convincing match in a register that isn’t online. So if you can’t find a record for someone (and even if you can find some possibilities) you should investigate which parish registers have been digitised for the region where you think your family lived, and which have not – which may require detective work.
‘An unprecedented number of indexes can be searched online’