Parish Register Research

Yesterday, I met a missionary on the British floor of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, whom we had first met when we started graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin fifty years ago. When her husband completed his PhD, they went to North Carolina and they are now serving a mission in the library. When you're having fun, it's a small world!

Another missionary showed me how to access and use a free internet website for searching parish registers in England. Julie Mosman probably told me about this a while ago, because she is very involved in indexing Cornwall county data.

The free website is at www.freereg.org.uk. Because it does not end with “.com,” your internet browser will probably want you to type the “www.” when you type it onto your URL line. Using this free website is an alternative to renting the film and turning the crank, and it enabled me to put families together much more quickly. I confirmed some of the results by looking at the film for the parish I was searching and was very satisfied with the accuracy. My searches were included in the more than 33,000 that were done yesterday.

The steps for doing a search are:

1. go to the website

2. click on the underlined “Search Parish Registers” link (on the left side toward the bottom)

3. click on the underlined “Search now” link (again, on the left side of your screen)

4. decide which record type you want to search for (baptism, marriage or burial)

5. fill in the form with your ancestor's surname (you could experiment with the Soundex box)

6. decide whether you want to find a specific forename or leave that line blank

7. fill in the year and decide on an appropriate range

8. choose to narrow your search by selecting a County (from the list over on the right)

9. choose to narrow your search by selecting a Place (from the list over on the left)

10. finally, click on the “Search” button

11. then, evaluate the results and modify your search appropriately

This freereg website is a companion to freebmd and freecen. All three are projects of FreeUKGEN, which is devoted to helping people with their family history in England. Rod Neep (of Archive CD Books) founded freereg in 1999 and the search engine became available in 2006. You can learn more about these volunteer projects at the website. There is an FAQ link for addressing the more obvious questions.

In general, parish registers (freereg) started in 1538, civil registration (freebmd) started in 1837, and the first census (freecen) in England was in 1841. If you still have some other easy questions, I would be happy to try to help you.