Exploring parish registers on Ancestry

Climb the branches of your family tree back to the time of King Henry VIII when you explore the parish register collections on Ancestry. With millions of baptisms, marriages, burials and more to search, who will you discover?

The parish register collections on Ancestry cover many counties in England and the collection is regularly being added to.

Find, for instance:

• 17 million + baptisms, marriages and burials for London (1538-1812)

• 6.7 million for Norfolk (1600-1935)

• and 6.2 million baptisms alone for West Yorkshire (1813-1910) And these are just a very few of the more than 300 parish register collections available on Ancestry for you to explore.

What is particularly fascinating and useful about the collections on the website are the digitised images of the original registers. These not only allow you to study the scanned pages to see the historic entry for your ancestor, they also allow you to browse the registers, getting a feel for each community. (How many baptisms were there in your ancestor’s parish each year, for example? An insight such as this help you get a feel for the place they once lived).

Parish registers are unique to our research, providing as they do so many centuries of records about our forebears. Travel back in time with the collections on Ancestry, finding details about your family members in the neatly printed Victorian registers, back on into the 18th century and beyond as you decipher the beautiful manuscript entries of the time of the Tudor monarchs.

Recent additions to Ancestry include the Welsh parish registers, covering 500 parishes and including details for 14.5 million individuals over 8 million records, the earliest dating from 1538 coming forward to the 1900s. Covering all 13 historic counties in Wales, this is a treasure trove for those researching ancestors in the country.

To find the full list of the 300-plus Ancestry collections in the Ancestry UK parish record collection see www.ancestry.co.uk/ search/categories/epr/.

Make use of Phillimore’s Don’t miss the ever-useful Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, available digitally via the Ancestry parish record collections. Search to locate county maps showing historic parish boundaries, and citing the date from which the earliest parish record for the parish survives

https://familytr.ee/philanc

A beautiful parish register page from 1663: ‘A True Register of all the Christeninges, Burialles and Weddinges’

Following George Rose’s Act 1812, baptisms and burials were required to be entered on pre-printed forms, making them much easier for us to read than the earlier records