Where to find parish registers
Parish registers are recordsof baptisms, marriages and burials created by local churches that can help you trace your ancestors to before civil registration – and back to Tudor times. Chris Paton gives the lowdown on what’s available online
When researching our family history we start back by consulting civil registration records of births, marriages and deaths, which have been kept by the state in England and Wales from 1837, in Scotland from 1855, and in Ireland mainly from 1864. To go further back than these years we must consider a completely separate source, in the form of parish registers, as kept by various church insitutions across Britain and Ireland from Reformation times. These records can be broadly considered in two major categories – the records of the state churches, and the records of the Nonconformist or dissenting congregations, covering a range of further denominations.
State parish churches
Under their leadership, the state-based parish churches were each responsible for the registration of the vital records, these being births and baptisms, marriages, and deaths or burials. In England, Wales and Ireland this was the responsibility of the Anglican Church (the Church of England, the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland), which was episcopal in nature, with the monarch at its head overseeing an administrative hierarchy; this included archbishops and bishops and at the grass roots level, individual parish ministers. The exception to this system in Britain was the Presbyterian-based Church of Scotland (‘the Kirk’), where theoretically from 1560 onwards the minister only answered to his congregation and
