1. Parish Registers Online
Peter Christian
Who Do You Think You Are? Live
April 2017

2. Handout

3. 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

4. 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 ◊

5. FamilySearch National datasets County datasets ◊ Indexed vs Image-Only
International Genealogy Index (IGI)
Focus on christenings
County datasets ◊
Indexed vs Image-Only
Image restrictions

6. 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 ◊

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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 ◊

10. 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

11. 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

12. Locating Parishes Genuki parish lists
Family Search: England Jurisdictions 1851 ◊
Phillimore county maps at TheGenealogist
FHS area maps
Genuki Church Database ◊

13. Coverage Wide variation between sites and datasets
Many datasets are incomplete
not always obvious
Coverage details not always adequate ◊

14. Conclusion Confusing Frustrating Limited images Needs care
County-wide searches
Variety of indexes
Availability of images
Immense time-saver!

15. Parish Registers Online

16. Penshurst, Kent, 1558

21. FreeREG

22. Internet Archive

24. FamilySearch: 1851 Jurisdictions

28. Woodchurch, Kent

29. Ancestry: http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=5931