Jonathan Scott unveils his updated region-by-region guide to the key websites
Parish register news in recent months has been more about additions, tweaks and new search tools, rather than tent-pole county collections. If you’ve failed to find someone in the past, it’s definitely worth checking back because many counties have been updated since we last surveyed the UK. You might find that material from an elusive parish has arrived, that the date range has expanded, or perhaps there’s a newly improved index.
Ancestry launched important new Midland and south-east England collections in 2023, TheGenealogist, which has been concentrating on non-parish sources in recent months, is about to release a major set of data for Worcestershire, and Findmypast continues to add fresh batches through its partnerships with the Family History Federation and the Catholic Heritage Archive.
TheGenealogist has also just revealed that it’s been working to georeference its existing parish registers so they can be viewed through its Map Explorer tool, so you will see pinned locations of where ancestors were baptised, married or buried.
The focus here is the established church, but we do also touch on Catholic and nonconformist registers.
LONDON AND MIDDLESEX
Registers from the capital and the ancient county of Middlesex
It’s important to remember that many London boroughs were once part of counties that surround the city. You may well find sources in parish collections for historic Essex or Kent, for example. Indeed in September Findmypast (findmypast. co.uk) added a new set of ’Surrey’ material that contained images and transcriptions of baptisms from nonconformist chapels in the London borough of Southwark.
Aside from Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), which dominates thanks to its agreement with the London Metropolitan Archives, there are many useful resources. Boyd’s London Burials Index and the City of London Burials Index are available to members of the Society of Genealogists (sogdata. org.uk) or Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk).
The latter also has indexed transcriptions for Westminster and elsewhere, produced with the West Middlesex Family History Society (west-middlesex-fhs.org.uk).
FamilySearch (family search.org) has parish registers from Middlesex back to 1539 (updated in August last year and now containing two million records), as well as Catholic records for Southwark and Westminster. You can b
