Parish Registers Online Peter Christian Who Do You Think You Are? Live April 2017
Handout www.spub.co.uk/lectures/pr.pdf
The Challenge of Digital Parish Registers Not centrally held No standard format till 1812 Early hands can be hard to read ◊ and some in Latin
The Original Records Complete listing Partial listing National Index of Parish Registers (offline!) Record Office websites Partial listing Family History Library Catalog ◊ SoG catalogue Genuki church pages ◊
FamilySearch National datasets County datasets ◊ Indexed vs Image-Only International Genealogy Index (IGI) Focus on christenings County datasets ◊ Indexed vs Image-Only Image restrictions
FreeREG Free volunteer-run site Includes Scotland & Channel Islands Current data 18,852,340 baptisms 6,045,666 marriages 13,310,363 burials Counties vary in coverage ◊
The Commercial Sites The main sites Material mostly licensed from Ancestry Findmypast TheGenealogy Material mostly licensed from Record offices Family History Societies Coverage sometimes hard to find Look for A-Z of records or similar Details of individual collections
Printed indexes TheGenealogist Book archives Phillimore volumes and others Book archives Google Books (full text not always available) The Internet Archive (1443 entries – downloadable) ◊ Optical Character Recognition indexing not always reliable
Local collections Record offices Family History Societies e.g. Essex, Herts ◊, Medway ◊ Some free, some charged Often images only Family History Societies One-Place Studies Local volunteers Individual local projects ◊ Online Parish Clerks ◊
Scotland: ScotlandsPeople OPRs (Church of Scotland) – 1553 Other Presbyterians – 1716 Roman Catholic Registers – c. 1800 Not (as yet) Scottish Episcopal Church other non-conformists congregations Complete list of churches on Help pages
Ireland Churches: Some on main commercial sites Established Church: Church of Ireland Roman Catholic Presbyterian, Methodist & other non-conformists Some on main commercial sites NLI: Catholic registers (images) RootsIreland: all churches
Locating Parishes Genuki parish lists Family Search: England Jurisdictions 1851 ◊ Phillimore county maps at TheGenealogist FHS area maps Genuki Church Database ◊
Coverage Wide variation between sites and datasets Many datasets are incomplete not always obvious Coverage details not always adequate ◊
Conclusion Confusing Frustrating Limited images Needs care County-wide searches Variety of indexes Availability of images Immense time-saver!
Parish Registers Online www.spub.co.uk/lectures/pr.pdf
Penshurst, Kent, 1558
http://www.genuki.org.uk/cgi-bin/churchentry?CCC=SSX,ID=139
FreeREG
Internet Archive
FamilySearch: 1851 Jurisdictions
Woodchurch, Kent
Ancestry: http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=5931