A History of Parish Registers Searching Parish Registers Where can I find information on...?

About Parish Registers

Parish Registers are...

...records of baptisms, marriages, and burials made by the Church. They are a valuable resource for researching your family tree because the census and official records of birth, marriage and death do not go back further than 1837.

Phillimore's Marriage Records is a series of books published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and holds transcriptions of marriage registers. Learn more about Phillimore's marriage registers below.

Parish records can extend your research back to the time of King Henry VIII. Most records go back to the 1600s, and some even go back to the 1500s.

Helping you with you Research

These records can help you trace your family roots back through baptisms, marriages, and burials.

To trace an ancestor, you will need to know where they lived and the church they went to - Parishes correspond quite closely to villages of the same name. Whereas a rural parish may include a small village and two or three hamlets, there will be many parishes in the city, so you would need to determine in which your family lived.

Phillimore Marriage Registers

Phillimore, born William Phillimore Watts Stiff, was the son of Dr Stiff, a Nottingham Doctor. He later took the name Phillimore from the family of his grandmother. He became an Oxford-educated lawyer, and founded a British and Scottish Record Society along with the Canterbury and York Society. After he resigned from these societies, he turned his attention to his native country, and began the transcription and printing of marriage registers. When he died in 1914, he had covered 1200 parishes from different counties in 200 volumes.

Phillimore Marriage Registers is a series of books published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Phillimore & Co. Ltd. However, these registers do not cover all the parishes or complete dates - this depends on the surviving registers and the ones Phillimore collected, so there may be some omissions. In some counties, the coverage of parishes is very good, whereas in other counties just a few parishes were transcribed - most counties do not have every parish transcribed.