County (Parish) Registers

Usually, parish records are now kept at central libraries in larger cities, or at the various County Record Offices.

Photocopies of entries in parish registers can be bought for a small sum. Official records such as birth, marriage, or death certificates can also be bought, but will cost you a few pounds for each copy sought. Still not a high price to pay for the amount of information most official documents contain, which can reduce the time you might otherwise spend researching one minor point which might be provided on the certificate itself.

Parish registers in England go back as far as 1538, to the time when Thomas Cromwell ordered all churches to keep records of baptisms, marriages, and burials within the area of their jurisdiction. From 1598, parish clerks were ordered to send transcripts of the registers every year to their local bishop. This continued until 1837 when civil registration came into being.

Most parish registers are now available for inspection at County Record Offices (CROs), in the main town or city of the county. On a few isolated occasions one comes by registers which have not been deposited as ordered with correct bishops, such documents usually being well cared for by the vicar or other representative in the parish concerned.

Of parish registers themselves, marriage records can prove useful since they provide the names of parties, the groom's occupation, their parishes, marital status, and sometimes details of bride's father, parties' ages, and so on.

Marriages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can present problems for the researcher, since the need to have banns read and licences gained could be expensive, lengthy, and problematic. Many couples therefore hid under the cloak of ceremonies carried out secretly by parsons who would ask little if anything of the couple but enough to comply with basic legal requirements. Sometimes no one checked too carefully on the personal credentials either, and it is almost certain that a great many marriages carried out during the period are anything near as binding as the parties to them might have thought.

Elopements, bigamy, and unreliable marriages flourished under the practice that can lead many genealogists to despair, as the plot grows ever thicker. In 1754, an Act of Parliament passed aimed at removing clandestine marriages. Many ceremonies were to be performed in parish churches or other appointed religious property.

Baptism records provide much information about our ancestors, usually giving the father's surname for legitimate children the mother's for illegitimate and usually showing the place of birth, father's occupation, clergyman at the ceremony and sometimes a few other snippets of useful information.

Parish registers noted baptisms, not births. Therefore, it is usual only to find conformists registered in this way. Any ancestor not recorded in parish registers might therefore belong to nonconformist persuasions such as Quakers, Jews, and Roman Catholics, all of which kept their own usually well-maintained records.

A nonconformist record, which is of those not belonging to the Church of England, can make excellent reading and yield much useful information, since various other denominations were a great deal more astute in their approach to record keeping than were most parish clerks. Correct details of Roman Catholics, Jews, Nonconformist Protestants, and Huguenots, might be available from religious registers, many of them held in followers' meeting places in nearby large towns and cities. Alternatively, societies work to provide access to correct information.