Parish Registers

ONLINE Rosemary Collings presents our updated guide to the best sites for parish records

Don’t miss our updated region-by-region guide to the baptism, marriage and burial records available online

The magazine’s editorial team is continuing to work from home during the coronavirus lockdown, and at the moment it’s hard to know what the next day will bring. But one thing we can be sure about is that many of our readers are taking great solace from their favourite hobby at this difficult time. Fortunately, researching our ancestors has never been so easy to do from home, because of the millions of records that have now been digitised and made available on the web.

Parish registers are a crucial resource for family historians. Until the introduction of civil registration in 1837, they were the only means of recording births, marriages and deaths. Even afterwards, they are a great resource to find family who are missing from the civil registers, or discover details that the ‘official’ records miss out.

Almost all of the UK now has at least some representation in online parish records. In preparing our annual region-by-region guide, we found some major collections are still going strong from last year, while new records are being added all the time. Significant additions in the past year include new Bristol records on ancestry.co.uk and Surrey records on findmypast. co.uk. But wherever your ancestors lived, we hope that this guide will offer resources to help you break down your brick walls and discover their stories.