Everything You Need To Know About British Parish Records | Genealogy

Everything You Need To Know About British Parish Records | Genealogy

Everything You Need To Know About British Parish Records | Genealogy

A big hello every one and welcome back to the channel, in todays video we are going to take a look at British Parish records and find out how they can help you learn more about your ancestors. This is the ninth video in this origin series and follows on from several How to videos for the genealogist and a deep dive into a few DNA Haplogroup videos. Today, DNA is an important tool for genealogical research just as important as the paper trail you will slowly put together. As genetic DNA will help tie together your hard work and research together with science of genetic DNA. As part of todays video we will also take a look at the history of the parish record and learn lots about what you might discover buried in their dusty pages. Before the introduction of Civil Registration in 1837, the only records to the key events in people’s lives were recorded in the registers of parish churches and some non-conformist places of worship. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, the Vicar General to King Henry VIII, declared that all marriages, baptisms and burials should be recorded; normally these are kept at the Parish Church, and are known as ‘Parish Records’.  In 1598 an Act was also passed that meant these records should be copied and sent to the bishop, these are known as Bishop’s Transcripts. Although most parish registers usually date to around the mid-16th Century, when Elizabeth I declared that accurate registers should be maintained, some are also available from 1538.  Elizabeth I had instructed that they should be preserved in bound books and not on any old scrap of writing material. Even after her efforts, many registers have been lost over the years and those surviving today are now usually safely deposited in the local record office, not the church they are associated with. Parish registers can contain large gaps, such as for the Commonwealth period, which can leave the mid-1600s looking sparse. You also get volumes which have gone missing over the years leaving frustratingly large gaps. Small gaps are not as bad unless they happen to coincide with the event you are looking for. These are usually due to negligence, often occurring where the clerk didn’t enter them at the time and forgot to do it later. If you are lucky, some of the larger gaps in Parish Records caused by lost volumes may be covered by the Bishop’s or Archdeacon’s Transcripts. These are copies of the events copied from the Parish registers which were sent to the Diocese each year. BT’s may themselves be incomplete, especially at the beginning or end of the periods. Unlike the Census or the Civil registration material, Parish Records are scattered all across the country, so it will be well into the future, if ever, that we will be able to search them online in the same way. Most churches have deposited records over 100 years old at their local record office, but some still retain burial registers for example, that were started in the last century and still are not full yet. Chapel records are not as well preserved, some are in private hands and many have been lost. However, there are many parish register transcripts published by various parish record societies, historical groups and individuals and these lend themselves to being made accessible online. Using the Parish Registers: Most people are tracing a surname line, but the tradition of marrying in the bride’s parish can make marriages before 1837 difficult to trace. When a man marries out of the parish there are often no clues as to where he went, thus requiring extensive searching of an ever widening circle of surrounding parishes in the hope of finding him. You may strike it lucky if they were married by Banns and the Banns register still exists, though not many do. Early genealogists, for whom record access was more difficult than today, recognised the difficulties of tracing marriages and this led to several of them creating manuscript indexes. The best known are Boyd’s and Pallot’s, however Phillimore set about it in a different way, transcribing and publishing marriages from many churches. The website – The genealogist has a great selection of marriages recorded in the Phillimore series of transcripts What information do Parish Records hold? Baptism records – forenames and surname, date of baptism and fathers name.  They might also list the place of birth, fathers occupation, birthdate and mothers name. Burial records –  forenames and surname, abode, age at time of death, date and place of burial and occupation. Marriage records  –  date of the marriage, brides forenames and surname, grooms forenames and surname and parish. Occupations, previous marital status and witnesses were sometimes included. #parishrecords #parishregister #genealogy

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  • Published: 23 May 2022
  • Location: Chelmsford, Essex
  • Duration: 14:31
  • Photography – Stephen Robert Kuta
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Everything You Need To Know About British Parish Records | Genealogy

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