PARISH RECORDS

Parish Registers

Until the Registration and Marriage Acts of 1836 came into operation on 1 July 1837, there was no provision for the cental registration of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales. Previously, under Thomas Cromwell's Injunctions of 1538, records of baptisms, marriages and burials were kept in Parish Registers by clergy of the Church of England. The earliest registers were generally paper books and few originals have survived. In 1598 Elizabeth I approved a 1597 provincial Constitution of Canterbury which ordered that parchment registers should be kept and that entries from the earliest registers should be copied into them. It also provided for transcripts to be made from the registers and submitted yearly to the diocesan registrar. Transcripts survive in some dioceses from earlier in the century and it is possible that general submission of transcripts had been ordered earlier than 1598.

At first, baptisms, marriages and burials would all be recorded in the same book, but as time went on these usually separated out into individual books. The Hardwick Marriage Act of 1754, in addition to making clandestine marriages illegal, dictated that separate books should be used for recording marriages and laid down that every entry should include the names of the bride and bridegroom, their ages if under 21, their residence, marital status and the signatures of both parties and two witnesses. The Parochial Registration Act of 1812 laid down a standard format for all entries in the Parish Register and stipulated the use of pre-printed books.

Parish Registers are still held locally, either in the custody of the incumbent and churchwardens or depositied in a local record office.

Bishops Transcripts

There are usually gaps in the coverage of Bishops Transcrips, either because of the failure of incumbents to make the returns or because they have been destroyed. There are none for the period of the Commonwealth 1649-60. In theory the transcripts were faithful copies of the parish registers sent at intervals to the Bishop, however in most cases there are considerable differences between the two documents, involving variations in spelling and dates, omissions and erronious inclusions. It is always worth checking entries extracted from transcripts with the original registers and vice versa.

Transcripts are usually held in Diocesan Record Offices or County Record Offices (in some cases they are one and the same).